Click on the headline to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archives for an online copy of the article mentioned in the headline.
Markin comment:
Blame it on Leon Trotsky, Blame it on Lenin. Blame it on the Russian October Revolution of 1917. Or, maybe, just blame it on my reaction to the residue from the bourgeois July Fourth celebrations. Today I am, in any case, in a mood for “high Trotskyism.” That is always a good way to readjust the political compass, and read some very literate political writing as well. With all due respect to black author James Baldwin and his great work, Another Country, featured today Jimmy you have to share the stage today. Okay?
Tuesday, July 06, 2010
*From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky-"Art And Politics In Our Epoch"
Click on the headline to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archives for an online copy of the article mentioned in the headline.
Markin comment:
Blame it on Leon Trotsky, Blame it on Lenin. Blame it on the Russian October Revolution of 1917. Or, maybe, just blame it on my reaction to the residue from the bourgeois July Fourth celebrations. Today I am, in any case, in a mood for “high Trotskyism.” That is always a good way to readjust the political compass, and read some very literate political writing as well. With all due respect to black author James Baldwin and his great work, Another Country, featured today Jimmy you have to share the stage today. Okay?
Markin comment:
Blame it on Leon Trotsky, Blame it on Lenin. Blame it on the Russian October Revolution of 1917. Or, maybe, just blame it on my reaction to the residue from the bourgeois July Fourth celebrations. Today I am, in any case, in a mood for “high Trotskyism.” That is always a good way to readjust the political compass, and read some very literate political writing as well. With all due respect to black author James Baldwin and his great work, Another Country, featured today Jimmy you have to share the stage today. Okay?
*From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky-"The Lesson Of Spain"
Click on the headline to link to the Leon Trotsky Internet Archives for an online copy of the article mentioned in the headline.
Markin comment:
Blame it on Leon Trotsky, Blame it on Lenin. Blame it on the Russian October Revolution of 1917. Or, maybe, just blame it on my reaction to the residue from the bourgeois July Fourth celebrations. Today I am, in any case, in a mood for “high Trotskyism.” That is always a good way to readjust the political compass, and read some very literate political writing as well. With all due respect to black author James Baldwin and his great work, Another Country, featured today Jimmy you have to share the stage today. Okay?
Markin comment:
Blame it on Leon Trotsky, Blame it on Lenin. Blame it on the Russian October Revolution of 1917. Or, maybe, just blame it on my reaction to the residue from the bourgeois July Fourth celebrations. Today I am, in any case, in a mood for “high Trotskyism.” That is always a good way to readjust the political compass, and read some very literate political writing as well. With all due respect to black author James Baldwin and his great work, Another Country, featured today Jimmy you have to share the stage today. Okay?
Monday, July 05, 2010
*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-The Comintern Theses on Work Among Women
Click on the headline to link to a Leon Trotsky Internet Archives online copy of his 1921 Speech Delivered at the Second World Conference of Communist Women from Volume One of The First Five Years Of The Communist International.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1981 issue of Women and Revolution that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
************
Markin comment on this article:
Over the past couple of years I have placed as many still relevant social, political, literary, and cultural articles from the journal Women and Revolution as I have been able to find as a source for leftist militants to think about these questions that are not always directly related to our day to day tasks in the class struggle today. I have made some effort into trying to get as many articles about the experiences of the Soviet Union as possible because that experience is, in some senses, our only example of what could have been had things turned out a bit differently back in the early days of the Russian revolution.
A couple of general observations about the tenor of the Soviet-centered articles. First, each article starts with items and ideas that spoke to the promise of the revolution, the things that could or should have been done and that the Bolsheviks raised holy hell to try to accomplish. Second, each article notes that turning inward of the revolution and the erasing of institutions, movements, and currents that surfaced in the revolutionary period and that were slammed in the period of Stalinist degeneration of the late 1920s. Those observations should be etched in the memory or every leftist militant who wants to fight for our communist future so we do better when our chance comes.
********
The Comintern Theses on Work Among Women
The Third Congress of the Communist International, meeting in Moscow from 22 June to 12 July 1921, adopted the following theses on the woman question. The Second International Congress of Communist Women, including delegates from as far away as Mexico and India, had met just prior to the Congress and also adopted this document. We are reprinting the Comintern - approved English-language edition, published by the Contemporary Publishing Association, New York City, 1921. (For a discussion of certain flaws in this translation, see "On the Comintern Theses on Work Among Women—I.S. Slander Refuted," W&R No. 4, Fall 1973). For space reasons, we are printing excerpts. The "Propaganda and Agitation Methods" section, which deals with tactical implementation, and the one-sentence conclusion, "Work on an International Basis," which directs the Women's Secretariat of the Comintern to oversee the work, have been dropped entirely.
The Theses set forth the Communists' determination to find effective means of propaganda and agitation-among women to win them to the cause of proletarian socialism. To the feminist notion of an "autonomous" women's movement, the Theses forthrightly counter-pose the need for class-conscious women's organizations led by the Communist vanguard in a united struggle against capitalism.
1. The Third Congress of the Comintern in conjunction with the Second International Women’s' Congress confirms the decision of the First and Second Congresses on the necessity for increasing the work of all the Communist Parties of the East and West among proletarian women. The masses of women workers must be educated in the spirit of Communism and so drawn into the struggle for Soviet Power and into the construction of the Soviet Labor Republic. In all countries the working classes, and consequently the
women workers, are faced with the problem of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The capitalist economic system has got into a blind alley, for there is no room for the further development of industrial forces within that system. The general impoverishment of the workers, the impotence of the bourgeoisie to revive production, the development of speculative enterprises, the decay in the production system, unemployment, the fluctuation of prices out of keeping with wages,— all this leads inevitably to the deepening of the class struggle in all countries. This struggle is to decide who shall conduct, administer, and organize production, and upon what system that should be done,—whether it should be in the hands of a clique of bourgeois exploiters, and be carried on upon the principles of capitalism and private property; or in the hands of the producing class and carried on upon a Communist basis.
The newly rising class, the class of producers, must in accordance with the laws of economic production, take the productive apparatus into its own hands, and set up new forms of public economy. Only in such a way will it be possible to create the necessary impetus for the development of the economic forces to the maximum and for the removal of the anarchy of capitalist production.
So long as the power of government is in the hands of the bourgeois class, the proletariat has no power to organize production. No reforms, no measure, carried out by the democratic or socialistic governments of the bourgeois countries, are able to save the situation. They cannot alleviate the unbearable sufferings of the working women and working men, sufferings which are due to the disorganization of the capitalist system of production, and which are going to last as long as the power is in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Only by seizing the power of government will the proletariat be able to take hold of the means of production, and thus secure the possibility of directing the economic development in the interests of the toilers.
In order to hasten the hour of the decisive conflict between the proletariat and the degenerating bourgeois world, the working class must adhere to the firm and unhesitating
tactics outlined by the Third International. The most fundamental and immediate goal determining the methods of work and the line of struggle for the proletariat of both sexes must be the dictatorship of labor.
As the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat is the vital question before the proletariat of all the capitalist countries, and the construction of Communism is the important task of those countries where the dictatorship is already in the hands of the workers, the Third Congress of the Communist International maintains that the conquest of power by the proletariat, as well as the achievement of Communism in those countries where the capitalist state has already been overthrown, can be realized only with the active participation of the wide masses of the proletarian and semi-proletarian women.
On the other hand the Congress once more calls the attention of all women to the fact that without the support of the Communist parties in all the tasks and undertakings leading to the liberation and enfranchisement of the women, this task is practically impossible of achievement.
2. The interest of the working class, especially at the present moment, imperatively demands the recruiting of women into the organized ranks of the proletariat, fighting for Communism.
The economic ruin throughout the world is becoming more acute and more unbearable to the entire city and country poor. Before the working class of the bourgeois-capitalist countries the question of the social revolution rises more and more clearly, and before the working class of Soviet Russia the question of reconstructing the public economy of the land on a new communist basis, becomes more and more vital. Both these tasks will be more easily realized, the more active and the more conscious and willing the participation of the women.
3. Wherever the question of the conquest of power arises, the Communist Parties must consider the great danger to the revolution represented by the inert, uninformed masses of women workers, housewives, employees, peasant women, not liberated from the influence of the bourgeois church and bourgeois superstitions, and not connected in some way or other with the great liberating movement of Communism. Unless the masses of women of the East and West are drawn into this movement, they inevitably become the stronghold of the bourgeoisie and the object of counter-revolutionary propaganda. The experience of the revolution in Hungary, where the ignorance of the masses of women played such a pitiful part, should serve, in this case, as a warning for the proletariat of all other countries entering upon the road of social revolution.
On the other hand, the experience of the Soviet Republic showed in practice how important the participation of the women workers and peasants has been in the civil war in the defence of the Republic, as well as in all other activities of the Soviet construction. Facts have proven the importance of the part which the women workers and peasants have already played in the Soviet Republic in the organization of defence, strengthening the rear; the struggle against desertion, and against all sorts of counter-revolution, sabotage, etc. The experience of the Workers Republic must serve as a lesson to all other countries.
Hence, the direct task of the Communist Parties: to spread the influence of the Communist Party to the widest circles of the women population of their countries; organizing a special party body and applying special methods; appealing to the women outside of it, to free them from the influence of the bourgeoisie and the compromising parties, and educating them to be real fighters for Communism, and therefore for the complete enfranchisement of the women.
4. Putting before the Communist Parties of the East and West the direct task of extending the activity of the Party among the women proletariat the Third Congress of the Comintern declares also to the women of the entire world, that their emancipation from age-long slavery and inequality depend upon the victory of communism.
What Communism offers to the women, the bourgeois women's movement will never afford her. So long as the power of capitalism and private property continue to exist, the emancipation of woman from subservience to her husband cannot proceed further than her right to dispose of her property and earnings, as she sees fit, and also to decide on equal terms with her husband, the destiny of their children.
The most definite aim of the feminists—to grant the vote to the women—under the regime of bourgeois parliamentarism, does not solve the question of the actual equalization of women, especially of those of the dispossessed classes. This has been clearly demonstrated by the experience of the working women in those capitalist countries where the bourgeoisie has formally recognized the equality of the sexes. The right to vote does not remove the prime cause of women's enslavement in the family and in society. The substitution of the church marriage by civil marriage does not in the least alleviate the situation. The dependence of the proletarian woman upon the capitalist and upon, her husband as the economic mainstay of the family remains just the same. The absence of adequate laws to safeguard motherhood and infancy and the lack of proper social education render entirely impossible the equalization of woman's position in matrimonial relations. As a matter of fact, nothing that can be done under the capitalist order will furnish the key to the solution of the problem of the relationship of the sexes.
Only under Communism, not merely the formal, but the actual equalization of women will be achieved. Then woman will be the rightful owner, on a par with all the members of the working class, of the means of production and distribution. She will participate in the management of industry and she will assume an equal responsibility for the well-being of society.
In other words, only by overthrowing the system of exploitation of man by man, and by supplanting the capitalist mode of production by the Communist organization of industry will the full emancipation of woman be achieved. Only Communism affords the conditions which are necessary in order that the natural functions of woman—motherhood—should not come into conflict with her social obligations and hinder her creative work for the benefit of society. On the contrary, Communism will facilitate the most harmonious and diversified development of a healthy and beautiful personality that is indissolubly bound together with the whole life and activities of entire society. Communism should be the aim of all women who are fighting for complete emancipation and real freedom.
But, Communism is also the final aim of the proletariat. Consequently, the struggle of the working women for this aim must be carried on in the interests of both, under a united leadership and control, as "one and indivisible" to the entire world movement of the revolutionary proletariat.
5. The Third Congress of the Comintern confirms the basic proposition of revolutionary Marxism, i.e., that there is no "specific woman question" and no "specific women's movement," and, that every sort of alliance of working women with bourgeois feminism, as well as any support by the women workers of the treacherous tactics of the social-compromisers and opportunists leads to the undermining of the forces of the proletariat, delaying thereby the triumph of the social revolution and the advent of Communism, and thus also postponing the great hour of women's ultimate liberation.
Communism will be achieved not by "united efforts of all women of different classes," but by the united struggle of all the exploited. In their own interests the masses of proletarian women should support the revolutionary tactics of the Communist Party and take a most active and direct part in all mass-actions and all forms of civil war on a national and international scope.
6. Woman's struggle against her double oppression(capitalism and her home and family subservience), at its highest stage of development assumes an international character, becoming identified with the struggle of the proletariat of both sexes under the banner of the Third International for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Soviet System.
7. While warning the women workers against entering into any form of alliance and co-operation with the bourgeois feminists, the Third Congress of the Comintern, at the same time, points out to the workingwomen of all countries that to cherish any illusions of
the possibility for the proletarian women to support the Second International or any of the opportunistically inclined elements adhering to it without causing serious damage to the cause of women's emancipation—will prove infinitely detrimental for the liberating struggle of the proletariat. The women must constantly remember that woman's present-day slavery has grown out of the bourgeois order. In order to put an end to women's slavery it is necessary to inaugurate the new Communist organization of society.
Any support rendered to the Second and Second-and-a-half Internationals hampers the social revolution, delaying the advent of the new order. The more resolutely and uncompromisingly the women masses will turn away from the Second and the Second-and-a-half Internationals, the more certain will be the triumph of the Social Revolution. It is the sacred duty of all women Communists to condemn those who flinch from the revolutionary tactics of the Comintern and to Communist Party and take a most active and direct part in all mass-actions and all forms of civil war on a national and international scope.
8. The support of the Comintern by the women workers of all occupations should, first of all, express itself in their willingness to enter into the ranks of the Communist Party of their respective countries. In those countries and parties where the struggle between the Second and Third Internationals has not yet come to a head, it is the duty of the women workers to support, by all means, the Party and groups that stand for the Comintern and carry on a relentless warfare against all vacillating and avowedly treacherous elements, irrespective of any authorities holding a different view. The class-conscious women who are striving for emancipation should not remain in any parties which have not joined the Comintern. Those who are opposed to the Third International are the enemies of the emancipation of women.
The place of conscious working women in Eastern and Western countries is under the flag of the Communist International and in the ranks of the Communist Parties of their own countries. All wavering on the part of the working women and the fear to sever connection with the parties of compromise, and the hitherto acknowledged authorities have a pernicious influence on the satisfactory progress of the great proletarian struggle which is assuming the nature of an open and relentless civil war on a World scale.
Methods and Form of Work Among Women
Owing to all the above mentioned reasons, the Third Congress of the Comintern holds that the work among the proletarian women should be carried on by the Communist Parties of all countries, on the following basis:
1. Women must be enlisted as full-fledged members of the Party, on the basis of equality and independence, in all militant class organizations, trade unions, co¬operatives, factory committees, etc.
2. To recognize the importance of recruiting women into all branches of the active struggle of the proletariat (including military service for the defence of the proletariat} and into the construction of new forms of society and the organization of industry and life on a communist basis.
3. To recognize the functions of motherhood as a social function, promoting and supporting appropriate measures to aid and protect women as the bearer of the human race.
Being earnestly opposed to the separate organization of women into all sorts*of parties, unions, or any other special women's organizations, the Third Congress, nevertheless, believes that in view of: a) the present conditions of subjection prevailing not only in the bourgeois-capitalist countries, but also in countries under the Soviet system, undergoing transition from capitalism to communism; b) the great inertness and political ignorance of the masses of women, due to the fact that they have been for centuries barred from social life and to age-long slavery in the family, and, c) the special functions imposed upon women by nature—childbirth, and the peculiarities attached to this, calling for the protection of her strength and health in the interests of the entire community, the Third Congress therefore considers it necessary to find special methods of work among the women of the Communist Parties and establishes a standard of special apparatus within the Communist Parties for the realization of this work. The apparatus for this work among the women in the Party should be the sections or committees for work among women, organized by all party committees commencing with the Executive Committee and ending with the city districts or village party committees. This decision is obligatory for all parties attached to the Comintern....
Work of the Party Amongst Women in Soviet Countries
It is the task of the Sections of the Soviet Labor Republics to educate the masses of working women in a spirit of communism, by attracting them to the Communist Party; to inspire and develop activity and self-reliance, by drawing them into the work of constructive Communism and bringing them up as staunch defenders of the Communist International.
It is the task of the Sections to attract the women to every form of Soviet construction, including questions of defense, as well as all the many economic plans of the
Republic. ,
In the Soviet Republics the Sections should see that all the regulations of the 8th Congress of Soviets regarding the attraction of working and peasant women to the work of building up and organizing public production, as well as their participation in the work of all those organs which direct, manage, control and organize production should be carried out. The Sections should participate through their representatives and through the Party organs in the elaboration of new laws and exercise an influence on the alteration of such as require much alteration in the interest of the enfranchisement of women. The Sections should take the greatest interest and show most initiative in the development of those laws which deal with the protection of the labor of women and children.
It is the duty of the Sections to attract the greatest possible number of working and peasant women to all election campaigns of Soviets, as also to see to it that working and peasant women are elected as members of Soviets and Executive Committees,
The Sections should make it their business to assist in every way possible in making a success of political and economic campaigns carried on by the Party.
It is the task of the Sections to assist the growth of skilled women labor by means of professional education, as well as to facilitate the admission of the working and peasant women to the corresponding educational establishments.
The Sections should facilitate the entrance of working women into the Commission for the Protection of Labor in various enterprises, and should also accelerate the activity of the auxiliary Committees for the Protection of Mother and Child.
The Sections should make it their business to assist the development of all social institutions, such as communal kitchens, laundries, repairing shops, institutions of social education, communal houses, etc. which, basing as they do, the conditions of life upon 2 new Communist principle, ameliorate the difficulties which women experience during the transition period; assist their rapid enfranchisement and transform the slave of the family and the home into a free co-worker in the great social renaissance, a fellow creator of new forms of life.
Through the organizers working among women elected by the Communist fraction of trade unions, the Sections should assist in the education of the women workers, members of the trade unions, in the spirit o Communism.
The Sections should look after the due attendance o the working women at all general factory delegate conferences.
The Sections should carry out a systematic distribution of auxiliary workers, for all the Soviet, economic and trade union work.
The Sections must first of all take deep and firm roots among the proletarian women, wage-earners, and organize propaganda among employees, housewives and peasant women.
To build up a firm connection between the Party and the mass of the people, and to spread its influence over the non-party members of society, and also, to develop the method of the education of the women folks in this spirit of Communism, by teaching self-activity am participation in practical work, the Women's Section are to organize delegate meetings of women workers
The delegate meetings are the best means to educate the women workers and peasants, and to spread the Party influence amongst the backward masses c women workers and peasants.
These delegates meetings are formed from factor and shop representatives of a certain region, city or volost. I n Soviet Russia, the women delegates are draw into all kinds of political and economic campaign They are sent into different committees in industry, are invited to control Soviet institutions, and used for regular work in the Soviet Departments, in the capacity of clerks, for two months (Law of 1921).
The women delegates should be elected at general meetings of the shop workers, of the housewives and employees, according to a certain rate of representation fixed by the Party. The Women's Sections are obliged to carry on propaganda and agitation among the delegates, for which purpose special meetings of women delegates are to be arranged not less than twice a month. The delegates are requested to make reports of their activities either in the shops where they work, or at meetings arranged in the city districts. The delegates should be elected for a period of three months.
Another form of agitation among the women is the organization of large non-party conferences of women workers and peasants. Representatives to conferences are to be elected at meetings held for women workers—at their place of work, and for peasant women—in the villages.
The Section for work among women is charged to call the conferences, as well as to supervise their work.
In order to make the best use of the experience that the women workers have secured by participating in the work and activities of the Party, the Branches and Committees carry on an elaborate campaign of propaganda by word of mouth and press. The Sections arrange meetings and discussions for the women workers at the shops and for the housewives at the city clubs. They exercise control over the delegates meetings and carry on house to house agitation.
To train active workers among the women, and to widen their understanding of communism, the party must organize with the help of the Sections, special courses for work among the women, at each Party school or school for Soviet work.
In Capitalist Countries
The current tasks of the Committees or Sections for work among women are initiated by the circumstances of the period. On the one hand, the ruin of world economy, the rampant growth of unemployment; especially effecting the women workers and tending to increase prostitution, the high cost of living, the acute housing question, and the threats of new imperialistic laws; on the other hand, the unceasing strikes in all countries, repeated outbursts of armed uprisings of the proletariat, and the ever more violent civil war throughout the world, are the prologue to the inevitable world social revolution.
The women's committees must put forward the most important tasks of the proletariat, fight for the unabridged slogans of the Communist Party, of the Communists against the bourgeoisie and social-compromisers. The committees must see to it that the women are not only registered as equal members of the Party, trade unions and other militant workers organizations, which are waging the fight against all injustice or inequality of the women workers, but also that the women should be allowed to occupy responsible positions in the Party, Union or Cooperative on an equal basis with the men.
The Committees or Sections must facilitate the work of the wide masses of the women proletarians and peasant women in utilizing their franchise in the interests of the Communist Parties during election to the parliament and to all the public institutions, explaining at the same time the limitations of those rights, in the sense of weakening the capitalist exploitation, promoting enfranchisement of women, and replacing parliamentarism by the Soviet system.
The Committees must also aid the women workers, employees and peasant women to take a most active part in the elections of revolutionary, economic and' political Soviets of workers deputies, obtaining representation in them; awakening the political activity of the housewives, and carrying on a propaganda of the Soviet idea among the peasant women. The special concern of the Committees must be the realization of the principle of equal pay for equal work. It is the task of the Committee to start a campaign, drawing men and women workers into it, for free, universal education, aiding the women to become highly qualified in their work.
The Committees should see to it that women Communists take part in the legislative, municipal and other legislative organizations, in fact, wherever women have the right to vote.
While participating in the legislative, municipal and other organizations of bourgeois States, Communist women should strictly adhere to the tactics of the party, not concerning themselves so much with the realization of reforms within the limits of the bourgeois world order, as taking advantage of every live question and demand of the working women, as watch-words by which to lead the women into the active mass struggle for these demands, through the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The Committees or Sections must explain the disadvantages and waste of the system of individual house keeping, the bad bringing up and education of the children by the bourgeoisie, rallying the women workers to the struggle for practical improvement of the conditions of the working class, waged or supported by the Party.
The Committees must aid in recruiting the women to the Communist Party from the Trade Unions, for which purpose the Communist fraction of the Trade Unions appoints an organizer for work among the women, under the direction of the Party and the local branch. The entire work of the Committee must be carried on with one purpose in view: the development of the revolutionary activity of the masses and the hastening of the social revolution.
In Economically Backward Countries (the East)
In conjunction with the Communist Party the Women's Section should do everything possible to achieve in industrially weak countries, the recognition of the legal equality, the equality both of rights and obligations, of women in the Parties, Unions and other organizations of the working class.
The Sections or Committees should carry on, in conjunction with the Party, a struggle against prejudice, religious customs and > habits which maintain an oppressive hold upon the women; to achieve this, it is also necessary to carry on propaganda among the men.
The Communist Party, together with the Sections or Commissions, should carry out the principle of the equality of women in matters of education of children, family relations and general social life.
The Sections should look for support in their work, first of all, among the large classes of women who are exploited by capitalism in the capacity of workers in home industries (Koustar), as laborers on rice, cotton and other plantations, and assist in the general establishment of communal workshops and home (Koustar) co-operatives; this applies especially to all Eastern peoples living within the borders of Soviet Russia; the Sections should also assist in the general organization of all women engaged in plantation work with the working men united in trade unions.
The raising of the general educational level of the population is one of the best means of fighting the general stagnation of the country as well as religious prejudices. The Committees or Sections should, therefore, assist in the opening of schools for grownups and children, such schools also to be accessible to the women. In bourgeois countries the Committees should carry on a direct agitation to counteract the influence of the bourgeois schools.
Wherever possible, the Sections or Committees should carry the agitation into the homes of the women and utilize the field work of the women for purposes of agitation. They should also organize clubs for working women, doing everything to attract to these clubs the most backward section of the women. These clubs should represent cultural and educational centers and model institutions, illustrating what can be achieved by women for their emancipation, through such means of self-activity, as the organization of creches, kindergartens, schools for adults and so forth.
Special clubs should be organized for nomadic peoples.
In Soviet lands the Sections, together with the Party, should assist in the transformation of the existing recapitalize forms of production and economics into a communal form of production. They should be practically propagated, in a manner to convince the working women that the former home-life and home-production oppressed and exploited them, while communal labor will emancipate them.
With regard to the peoples of the East who live within the borders of Soviet Russia, the Sections should take care that Soviet legislation should equalize men and women, and that the interests of the women should be properly protected. For this purpose, the Sections should assist in appointing women to the position of judges, and as members of juries in national Courts of law.
The Sections should also get the women to participate in Soviets, taking care that working and peasant women should be elected into the Soviets and Executive Committees. All work among the women proletariat of the East should be done on a class basis. It should be the task of the sections to expose the powerlessness of the Moslem feminists in the solution of the question of the enfranchisement of women. For enlightening purpose in all the Soviet countries of the East, the intelligent feminine forces should be utilized, as, for instance, women teachers and sympathizers, avoiding all tactless and vulgar treatment of religious faiths and national traditions. The Sections or Committees working among the women of the East should definitely fight against nationalism and the hold of religion on the women's minds.
All of the organizations of the workers should, in the East as well as in the West, be built not upon the basis of defending national interest, but upon the unity of the International proletariat of both sexes striving for the same class aims.
Notice: The work among the Eastern women being of great importance, and at the same time representing a new problem for the Communist Parties, the Conference deems it necessary to add to those theses special instructions on the methods of communist propaganda among the women of the Eastern countries, appropriate to their local habits and conditions.
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1981 issue of Women and Revolution that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
************
Markin comment on this article:
Over the past couple of years I have placed as many still relevant social, political, literary, and cultural articles from the journal Women and Revolution as I have been able to find as a source for leftist militants to think about these questions that are not always directly related to our day to day tasks in the class struggle today. I have made some effort into trying to get as many articles about the experiences of the Soviet Union as possible because that experience is, in some senses, our only example of what could have been had things turned out a bit differently back in the early days of the Russian revolution.
A couple of general observations about the tenor of the Soviet-centered articles. First, each article starts with items and ideas that spoke to the promise of the revolution, the things that could or should have been done and that the Bolsheviks raised holy hell to try to accomplish. Second, each article notes that turning inward of the revolution and the erasing of institutions, movements, and currents that surfaced in the revolutionary period and that were slammed in the period of Stalinist degeneration of the late 1920s. Those observations should be etched in the memory or every leftist militant who wants to fight for our communist future so we do better when our chance comes.
********
The Comintern Theses on Work Among Women
The Third Congress of the Communist International, meeting in Moscow from 22 June to 12 July 1921, adopted the following theses on the woman question. The Second International Congress of Communist Women, including delegates from as far away as Mexico and India, had met just prior to the Congress and also adopted this document. We are reprinting the Comintern - approved English-language edition, published by the Contemporary Publishing Association, New York City, 1921. (For a discussion of certain flaws in this translation, see "On the Comintern Theses on Work Among Women—I.S. Slander Refuted," W&R No. 4, Fall 1973). For space reasons, we are printing excerpts. The "Propaganda and Agitation Methods" section, which deals with tactical implementation, and the one-sentence conclusion, "Work on an International Basis," which directs the Women's Secretariat of the Comintern to oversee the work, have been dropped entirely.
The Theses set forth the Communists' determination to find effective means of propaganda and agitation-among women to win them to the cause of proletarian socialism. To the feminist notion of an "autonomous" women's movement, the Theses forthrightly counter-pose the need for class-conscious women's organizations led by the Communist vanguard in a united struggle against capitalism.
1. The Third Congress of the Comintern in conjunction with the Second International Women’s' Congress confirms the decision of the First and Second Congresses on the necessity for increasing the work of all the Communist Parties of the East and West among proletarian women. The masses of women workers must be educated in the spirit of Communism and so drawn into the struggle for Soviet Power and into the construction of the Soviet Labor Republic. In all countries the working classes, and consequently the
women workers, are faced with the problem of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The capitalist economic system has got into a blind alley, for there is no room for the further development of industrial forces within that system. The general impoverishment of the workers, the impotence of the bourgeoisie to revive production, the development of speculative enterprises, the decay in the production system, unemployment, the fluctuation of prices out of keeping with wages,— all this leads inevitably to the deepening of the class struggle in all countries. This struggle is to decide who shall conduct, administer, and organize production, and upon what system that should be done,—whether it should be in the hands of a clique of bourgeois exploiters, and be carried on upon the principles of capitalism and private property; or in the hands of the producing class and carried on upon a Communist basis.
The newly rising class, the class of producers, must in accordance with the laws of economic production, take the productive apparatus into its own hands, and set up new forms of public economy. Only in such a way will it be possible to create the necessary impetus for the development of the economic forces to the maximum and for the removal of the anarchy of capitalist production.
So long as the power of government is in the hands of the bourgeois class, the proletariat has no power to organize production. No reforms, no measure, carried out by the democratic or socialistic governments of the bourgeois countries, are able to save the situation. They cannot alleviate the unbearable sufferings of the working women and working men, sufferings which are due to the disorganization of the capitalist system of production, and which are going to last as long as the power is in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Only by seizing the power of government will the proletariat be able to take hold of the means of production, and thus secure the possibility of directing the economic development in the interests of the toilers.
In order to hasten the hour of the decisive conflict between the proletariat and the degenerating bourgeois world, the working class must adhere to the firm and unhesitating
tactics outlined by the Third International. The most fundamental and immediate goal determining the methods of work and the line of struggle for the proletariat of both sexes must be the dictatorship of labor.
As the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat is the vital question before the proletariat of all the capitalist countries, and the construction of Communism is the important task of those countries where the dictatorship is already in the hands of the workers, the Third Congress of the Communist International maintains that the conquest of power by the proletariat, as well as the achievement of Communism in those countries where the capitalist state has already been overthrown, can be realized only with the active participation of the wide masses of the proletarian and semi-proletarian women.
On the other hand the Congress once more calls the attention of all women to the fact that without the support of the Communist parties in all the tasks and undertakings leading to the liberation and enfranchisement of the women, this task is practically impossible of achievement.
2. The interest of the working class, especially at the present moment, imperatively demands the recruiting of women into the organized ranks of the proletariat, fighting for Communism.
The economic ruin throughout the world is becoming more acute and more unbearable to the entire city and country poor. Before the working class of the bourgeois-capitalist countries the question of the social revolution rises more and more clearly, and before the working class of Soviet Russia the question of reconstructing the public economy of the land on a new communist basis, becomes more and more vital. Both these tasks will be more easily realized, the more active and the more conscious and willing the participation of the women.
3. Wherever the question of the conquest of power arises, the Communist Parties must consider the great danger to the revolution represented by the inert, uninformed masses of women workers, housewives, employees, peasant women, not liberated from the influence of the bourgeois church and bourgeois superstitions, and not connected in some way or other with the great liberating movement of Communism. Unless the masses of women of the East and West are drawn into this movement, they inevitably become the stronghold of the bourgeoisie and the object of counter-revolutionary propaganda. The experience of the revolution in Hungary, where the ignorance of the masses of women played such a pitiful part, should serve, in this case, as a warning for the proletariat of all other countries entering upon the road of social revolution.
On the other hand, the experience of the Soviet Republic showed in practice how important the participation of the women workers and peasants has been in the civil war in the defence of the Republic, as well as in all other activities of the Soviet construction. Facts have proven the importance of the part which the women workers and peasants have already played in the Soviet Republic in the organization of defence, strengthening the rear; the struggle against desertion, and against all sorts of counter-revolution, sabotage, etc. The experience of the Workers Republic must serve as a lesson to all other countries.
Hence, the direct task of the Communist Parties: to spread the influence of the Communist Party to the widest circles of the women population of their countries; organizing a special party body and applying special methods; appealing to the women outside of it, to free them from the influence of the bourgeoisie and the compromising parties, and educating them to be real fighters for Communism, and therefore for the complete enfranchisement of the women.
4. Putting before the Communist Parties of the East and West the direct task of extending the activity of the Party among the women proletariat the Third Congress of the Comintern declares also to the women of the entire world, that their emancipation from age-long slavery and inequality depend upon the victory of communism.
What Communism offers to the women, the bourgeois women's movement will never afford her. So long as the power of capitalism and private property continue to exist, the emancipation of woman from subservience to her husband cannot proceed further than her right to dispose of her property and earnings, as she sees fit, and also to decide on equal terms with her husband, the destiny of their children.
The most definite aim of the feminists—to grant the vote to the women—under the regime of bourgeois parliamentarism, does not solve the question of the actual equalization of women, especially of those of the dispossessed classes. This has been clearly demonstrated by the experience of the working women in those capitalist countries where the bourgeoisie has formally recognized the equality of the sexes. The right to vote does not remove the prime cause of women's enslavement in the family and in society. The substitution of the church marriage by civil marriage does not in the least alleviate the situation. The dependence of the proletarian woman upon the capitalist and upon, her husband as the economic mainstay of the family remains just the same. The absence of adequate laws to safeguard motherhood and infancy and the lack of proper social education render entirely impossible the equalization of woman's position in matrimonial relations. As a matter of fact, nothing that can be done under the capitalist order will furnish the key to the solution of the problem of the relationship of the sexes.
Only under Communism, not merely the formal, but the actual equalization of women will be achieved. Then woman will be the rightful owner, on a par with all the members of the working class, of the means of production and distribution. She will participate in the management of industry and she will assume an equal responsibility for the well-being of society.
In other words, only by overthrowing the system of exploitation of man by man, and by supplanting the capitalist mode of production by the Communist organization of industry will the full emancipation of woman be achieved. Only Communism affords the conditions which are necessary in order that the natural functions of woman—motherhood—should not come into conflict with her social obligations and hinder her creative work for the benefit of society. On the contrary, Communism will facilitate the most harmonious and diversified development of a healthy and beautiful personality that is indissolubly bound together with the whole life and activities of entire society. Communism should be the aim of all women who are fighting for complete emancipation and real freedom.
But, Communism is also the final aim of the proletariat. Consequently, the struggle of the working women for this aim must be carried on in the interests of both, under a united leadership and control, as "one and indivisible" to the entire world movement of the revolutionary proletariat.
5. The Third Congress of the Comintern confirms the basic proposition of revolutionary Marxism, i.e., that there is no "specific woman question" and no "specific women's movement," and, that every sort of alliance of working women with bourgeois feminism, as well as any support by the women workers of the treacherous tactics of the social-compromisers and opportunists leads to the undermining of the forces of the proletariat, delaying thereby the triumph of the social revolution and the advent of Communism, and thus also postponing the great hour of women's ultimate liberation.
Communism will be achieved not by "united efforts of all women of different classes," but by the united struggle of all the exploited. In their own interests the masses of proletarian women should support the revolutionary tactics of the Communist Party and take a most active and direct part in all mass-actions and all forms of civil war on a national and international scope.
6. Woman's struggle against her double oppression(capitalism and her home and family subservience), at its highest stage of development assumes an international character, becoming identified with the struggle of the proletariat of both sexes under the banner of the Third International for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and the Soviet System.
7. While warning the women workers against entering into any form of alliance and co-operation with the bourgeois feminists, the Third Congress of the Comintern, at the same time, points out to the workingwomen of all countries that to cherish any illusions of
the possibility for the proletarian women to support the Second International or any of the opportunistically inclined elements adhering to it without causing serious damage to the cause of women's emancipation—will prove infinitely detrimental for the liberating struggle of the proletariat. The women must constantly remember that woman's present-day slavery has grown out of the bourgeois order. In order to put an end to women's slavery it is necessary to inaugurate the new Communist organization of society.
Any support rendered to the Second and Second-and-a-half Internationals hampers the social revolution, delaying the advent of the new order. The more resolutely and uncompromisingly the women masses will turn away from the Second and the Second-and-a-half Internationals, the more certain will be the triumph of the Social Revolution. It is the sacred duty of all women Communists to condemn those who flinch from the revolutionary tactics of the Comintern and to Communist Party and take a most active and direct part in all mass-actions and all forms of civil war on a national and international scope.
8. The support of the Comintern by the women workers of all occupations should, first of all, express itself in their willingness to enter into the ranks of the Communist Party of their respective countries. In those countries and parties where the struggle between the Second and Third Internationals has not yet come to a head, it is the duty of the women workers to support, by all means, the Party and groups that stand for the Comintern and carry on a relentless warfare against all vacillating and avowedly treacherous elements, irrespective of any authorities holding a different view. The class-conscious women who are striving for emancipation should not remain in any parties which have not joined the Comintern. Those who are opposed to the Third International are the enemies of the emancipation of women.
The place of conscious working women in Eastern and Western countries is under the flag of the Communist International and in the ranks of the Communist Parties of their own countries. All wavering on the part of the working women and the fear to sever connection with the parties of compromise, and the hitherto acknowledged authorities have a pernicious influence on the satisfactory progress of the great proletarian struggle which is assuming the nature of an open and relentless civil war on a World scale.
Methods and Form of Work Among Women
Owing to all the above mentioned reasons, the Third Congress of the Comintern holds that the work among the proletarian women should be carried on by the Communist Parties of all countries, on the following basis:
1. Women must be enlisted as full-fledged members of the Party, on the basis of equality and independence, in all militant class organizations, trade unions, co¬operatives, factory committees, etc.
2. To recognize the importance of recruiting women into all branches of the active struggle of the proletariat (including military service for the defence of the proletariat} and into the construction of new forms of society and the organization of industry and life on a communist basis.
3. To recognize the functions of motherhood as a social function, promoting and supporting appropriate measures to aid and protect women as the bearer of the human race.
Being earnestly opposed to the separate organization of women into all sorts*of parties, unions, or any other special women's organizations, the Third Congress, nevertheless, believes that in view of: a) the present conditions of subjection prevailing not only in the bourgeois-capitalist countries, but also in countries under the Soviet system, undergoing transition from capitalism to communism; b) the great inertness and political ignorance of the masses of women, due to the fact that they have been for centuries barred from social life and to age-long slavery in the family, and, c) the special functions imposed upon women by nature—childbirth, and the peculiarities attached to this, calling for the protection of her strength and health in the interests of the entire community, the Third Congress therefore considers it necessary to find special methods of work among the women of the Communist Parties and establishes a standard of special apparatus within the Communist Parties for the realization of this work. The apparatus for this work among the women in the Party should be the sections or committees for work among women, organized by all party committees commencing with the Executive Committee and ending with the city districts or village party committees. This decision is obligatory for all parties attached to the Comintern....
Work of the Party Amongst Women in Soviet Countries
It is the task of the Sections of the Soviet Labor Republics to educate the masses of working women in a spirit of communism, by attracting them to the Communist Party; to inspire and develop activity and self-reliance, by drawing them into the work of constructive Communism and bringing them up as staunch defenders of the Communist International.
It is the task of the Sections to attract the women to every form of Soviet construction, including questions of defense, as well as all the many economic plans of the
Republic. ,
In the Soviet Republics the Sections should see that all the regulations of the 8th Congress of Soviets regarding the attraction of working and peasant women to the work of building up and organizing public production, as well as their participation in the work of all those organs which direct, manage, control and organize production should be carried out. The Sections should participate through their representatives and through the Party organs in the elaboration of new laws and exercise an influence on the alteration of such as require much alteration in the interest of the enfranchisement of women. The Sections should take the greatest interest and show most initiative in the development of those laws which deal with the protection of the labor of women and children.
It is the duty of the Sections to attract the greatest possible number of working and peasant women to all election campaigns of Soviets, as also to see to it that working and peasant women are elected as members of Soviets and Executive Committees,
The Sections should make it their business to assist in every way possible in making a success of political and economic campaigns carried on by the Party.
It is the task of the Sections to assist the growth of skilled women labor by means of professional education, as well as to facilitate the admission of the working and peasant women to the corresponding educational establishments.
The Sections should facilitate the entrance of working women into the Commission for the Protection of Labor in various enterprises, and should also accelerate the activity of the auxiliary Committees for the Protection of Mother and Child.
The Sections should make it their business to assist the development of all social institutions, such as communal kitchens, laundries, repairing shops, institutions of social education, communal houses, etc. which, basing as they do, the conditions of life upon 2 new Communist principle, ameliorate the difficulties which women experience during the transition period; assist their rapid enfranchisement and transform the slave of the family and the home into a free co-worker in the great social renaissance, a fellow creator of new forms of life.
Through the organizers working among women elected by the Communist fraction of trade unions, the Sections should assist in the education of the women workers, members of the trade unions, in the spirit o Communism.
The Sections should look after the due attendance o the working women at all general factory delegate conferences.
The Sections should carry out a systematic distribution of auxiliary workers, for all the Soviet, economic and trade union work.
The Sections must first of all take deep and firm roots among the proletarian women, wage-earners, and organize propaganda among employees, housewives and peasant women.
To build up a firm connection between the Party and the mass of the people, and to spread its influence over the non-party members of society, and also, to develop the method of the education of the women folks in this spirit of Communism, by teaching self-activity am participation in practical work, the Women's Section are to organize delegate meetings of women workers
The delegate meetings are the best means to educate the women workers and peasants, and to spread the Party influence amongst the backward masses c women workers and peasants.
These delegates meetings are formed from factor and shop representatives of a certain region, city or volost. I n Soviet Russia, the women delegates are draw into all kinds of political and economic campaign They are sent into different committees in industry, are invited to control Soviet institutions, and used for regular work in the Soviet Departments, in the capacity of clerks, for two months (Law of 1921).
The women delegates should be elected at general meetings of the shop workers, of the housewives and employees, according to a certain rate of representation fixed by the Party. The Women's Sections are obliged to carry on propaganda and agitation among the delegates, for which purpose special meetings of women delegates are to be arranged not less than twice a month. The delegates are requested to make reports of their activities either in the shops where they work, or at meetings arranged in the city districts. The delegates should be elected for a period of three months.
Another form of agitation among the women is the organization of large non-party conferences of women workers and peasants. Representatives to conferences are to be elected at meetings held for women workers—at their place of work, and for peasant women—in the villages.
The Section for work among women is charged to call the conferences, as well as to supervise their work.
In order to make the best use of the experience that the women workers have secured by participating in the work and activities of the Party, the Branches and Committees carry on an elaborate campaign of propaganda by word of mouth and press. The Sections arrange meetings and discussions for the women workers at the shops and for the housewives at the city clubs. They exercise control over the delegates meetings and carry on house to house agitation.
To train active workers among the women, and to widen their understanding of communism, the party must organize with the help of the Sections, special courses for work among the women, at each Party school or school for Soviet work.
In Capitalist Countries
The current tasks of the Committees or Sections for work among women are initiated by the circumstances of the period. On the one hand, the ruin of world economy, the rampant growth of unemployment; especially effecting the women workers and tending to increase prostitution, the high cost of living, the acute housing question, and the threats of new imperialistic laws; on the other hand, the unceasing strikes in all countries, repeated outbursts of armed uprisings of the proletariat, and the ever more violent civil war throughout the world, are the prologue to the inevitable world social revolution.
The women's committees must put forward the most important tasks of the proletariat, fight for the unabridged slogans of the Communist Party, of the Communists against the bourgeoisie and social-compromisers. The committees must see to it that the women are not only registered as equal members of the Party, trade unions and other militant workers organizations, which are waging the fight against all injustice or inequality of the women workers, but also that the women should be allowed to occupy responsible positions in the Party, Union or Cooperative on an equal basis with the men.
The Committees or Sections must facilitate the work of the wide masses of the women proletarians and peasant women in utilizing their franchise in the interests of the Communist Parties during election to the parliament and to all the public institutions, explaining at the same time the limitations of those rights, in the sense of weakening the capitalist exploitation, promoting enfranchisement of women, and replacing parliamentarism by the Soviet system.
The Committees must also aid the women workers, employees and peasant women to take a most active part in the elections of revolutionary, economic and' political Soviets of workers deputies, obtaining representation in them; awakening the political activity of the housewives, and carrying on a propaganda of the Soviet idea among the peasant women. The special concern of the Committees must be the realization of the principle of equal pay for equal work. It is the task of the Committee to start a campaign, drawing men and women workers into it, for free, universal education, aiding the women to become highly qualified in their work.
The Committees should see to it that women Communists take part in the legislative, municipal and other legislative organizations, in fact, wherever women have the right to vote.
While participating in the legislative, municipal and other organizations of bourgeois States, Communist women should strictly adhere to the tactics of the party, not concerning themselves so much with the realization of reforms within the limits of the bourgeois world order, as taking advantage of every live question and demand of the working women, as watch-words by which to lead the women into the active mass struggle for these demands, through the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The Committees or Sections must explain the disadvantages and waste of the system of individual house keeping, the bad bringing up and education of the children by the bourgeoisie, rallying the women workers to the struggle for practical improvement of the conditions of the working class, waged or supported by the Party.
The Committees must aid in recruiting the women to the Communist Party from the Trade Unions, for which purpose the Communist fraction of the Trade Unions appoints an organizer for work among the women, under the direction of the Party and the local branch. The entire work of the Committee must be carried on with one purpose in view: the development of the revolutionary activity of the masses and the hastening of the social revolution.
In Economically Backward Countries (the East)
In conjunction with the Communist Party the Women's Section should do everything possible to achieve in industrially weak countries, the recognition of the legal equality, the equality both of rights and obligations, of women in the Parties, Unions and other organizations of the working class.
The Sections or Committees should carry on, in conjunction with the Party, a struggle against prejudice, religious customs and > habits which maintain an oppressive hold upon the women; to achieve this, it is also necessary to carry on propaganda among the men.
The Communist Party, together with the Sections or Commissions, should carry out the principle of the equality of women in matters of education of children, family relations and general social life.
The Sections should look for support in their work, first of all, among the large classes of women who are exploited by capitalism in the capacity of workers in home industries (Koustar), as laborers on rice, cotton and other plantations, and assist in the general establishment of communal workshops and home (Koustar) co-operatives; this applies especially to all Eastern peoples living within the borders of Soviet Russia; the Sections should also assist in the general organization of all women engaged in plantation work with the working men united in trade unions.
The raising of the general educational level of the population is one of the best means of fighting the general stagnation of the country as well as religious prejudices. The Committees or Sections should, therefore, assist in the opening of schools for grownups and children, such schools also to be accessible to the women. In bourgeois countries the Committees should carry on a direct agitation to counteract the influence of the bourgeois schools.
Wherever possible, the Sections or Committees should carry the agitation into the homes of the women and utilize the field work of the women for purposes of agitation. They should also organize clubs for working women, doing everything to attract to these clubs the most backward section of the women. These clubs should represent cultural and educational centers and model institutions, illustrating what can be achieved by women for their emancipation, through such means of self-activity, as the organization of creches, kindergartens, schools for adults and so forth.
Special clubs should be organized for nomadic peoples.
In Soviet lands the Sections, together with the Party, should assist in the transformation of the existing recapitalize forms of production and economics into a communal form of production. They should be practically propagated, in a manner to convince the working women that the former home-life and home-production oppressed and exploited them, while communal labor will emancipate them.
With regard to the peoples of the East who live within the borders of Soviet Russia, the Sections should take care that Soviet legislation should equalize men and women, and that the interests of the women should be properly protected. For this purpose, the Sections should assist in appointing women to the position of judges, and as members of juries in national Courts of law.
The Sections should also get the women to participate in Soviets, taking care that working and peasant women should be elected into the Soviets and Executive Committees. All work among the women proletariat of the East should be done on a class basis. It should be the task of the sections to expose the powerlessness of the Moslem feminists in the solution of the question of the enfranchisement of women. For enlightening purpose in all the Soviet countries of the East, the intelligent feminine forces should be utilized, as, for instance, women teachers and sympathizers, avoiding all tactless and vulgar treatment of religious faiths and national traditions. The Sections or Committees working among the women of the East should definitely fight against nationalism and the hold of religion on the women's minds.
All of the organizations of the workers should, in the East as well as in the West, be built not upon the basis of defending national interest, but upon the unity of the International proletariat of both sexes striving for the same class aims.
Notice: The work among the Eastern women being of great importance, and at the same time representing a new problem for the Communist Parties, the Conference deems it necessary to add to those theses special instructions on the methods of communist propaganda among the women of the Eastern countries, appropriate to their local habits and conditions.
*"From The "We Are Wide Awake" Website- Hear The Heroic Israeli Class- War Mordechai Vanunu Speak-Free Vanunu! Let Him Leave Israel!
Click on the headline to link to the We Are Wide Awake Website to hear more about Mordechai Vanunu
Markin comment:
I received this comment in response to a posting that I did on July 3, 2020 (reposted below) concerning the case of Israeli class-war prisoner Mordechai Vanunu. I am linking to that site in this post for the purpose of letting others hear from Brother Vanunu himself.
*********
1 Comments:
eileen fleming said...
Please listen to Vanunu speak for himself in 2005, 2006, 2008 video interviews and learn all about his FREEDOM OF SPEECH Trial and why Israel persists to persecute him @ http://wearewideawake.org/
THE VANUNU SAGA 2005-2010!
8:19 PM
**********
Markin comment:
Every person in the world, and I mean literally every person, owes a great debt of gratitude for Brother Vanunu's courageous acts in exposing the Israeli nuclear arsenal. Such men are dangerous to the imperial order-and we know why. Thanks, Brother. All Honor To Vanunu.
********
This is passed on from the Partisan Defesne Committee.
Workers Vanguard No. 960
4 June 2010
Thrown Back in Prison
Free Vanunu! Let Him Leave Israel!
On May 23, Mordechai Vanunu, the whistle-blower who spent 18 years in prison for exposing the extent of Israel’s nuclear arsenal, began serving a three-month prison sentence that stems from his December 29 arrest for meeting with a Norwegian woman in Jerusalem. Despite serving his entire prior sentence, Vanunu remains barred from talking to non-Israelis and going near airports, ports and embassies, subject to 24-hour surveillance and prevented from leaving the country.
Following his December arrest, Vanunu was sentenced to six months of “community service” in overwhelmingly Jewish West Jerusalem. Fearing his life would be threatened by right-wing Israelis who consider him a “traitor,” Vanunu requested that his sentence be served in predominantly Palestinian East Jerusalem. When the court rejected his request, Vanunu declined to carry out his community service. On May 11, he was sentenced to prison once again.
The vindictive, blood-soaked rulers of the Zionist state will not rest until Vanunu, a former technician at the Israeli nuclear weapons facility in Dimona, is forever silenced for having revealed that Israel had upwards of 200 nuclear warheads. This arsenal, built up with the active support of the French and then the U.S. imperialist powers, was enough not only to incinerate every Arab capital but to bomb major cities in the Soviet Union as well.
Vanunu was born to a Sephardic Jewish family that emigrated from Morocco to Israel, where he experienced discrimination at the hands of the European-derived Ashkenazi establishment. As a student at Beersheba’s Ben-Gurion University, he joined protests against Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and actively fought for the rights of Palestinian and Bedouin students. Fed up with the Israeli garrison state, Vanunu left the country in 1986 and later converted to Christianity while in Australia.
In 1986, he was kidnapped in Italy by the Israeli Mossad secret police, thrown into a desert prison in Ashkelon and sentenced by a secret military court. In prison, Vanunu was given the kind of treatment Israel’s rulers reserve for those they deem “subhuman”—the Palestinians imprisoned within the electric fences that surround Gaza, those confined behind the concrete walls and checkpoints of the West Bank, the thousands who languish in Israel’s prison torture chambers. He spent more than eleven years in solitary confinement, entombed in a six-by-nine cell in a high-security complex built for Palestinians.
When Vanunu walked out of prison in April 2004, he said that he was “proud and happy to do what I did.” He was arrested later that year and, in 2007, he was sentenced to another six months’ imprisonment. He remains defiant, declaring before he was dragged away to his cell last month, “You didn’t get anything from me in 18 years; you won’t get anything in 3 months. Shame on you, Israel.” Defenders of the Palestinian people and opponents of capitalist repression everywhere must take up the call to free this courageous opponent of Zionist terror and demand that he be allowed to leave Israel.
Markin comment:
I received this comment in response to a posting that I did on July 3, 2020 (reposted below) concerning the case of Israeli class-war prisoner Mordechai Vanunu. I am linking to that site in this post for the purpose of letting others hear from Brother Vanunu himself.
*********
1 Comments:
eileen fleming said...
Please listen to Vanunu speak for himself in 2005, 2006, 2008 video interviews and learn all about his FREEDOM OF SPEECH Trial and why Israel persists to persecute him @ http://wearewideawake.org/
THE VANUNU SAGA 2005-2010!
8:19 PM
**********
Markin comment:
Every person in the world, and I mean literally every person, owes a great debt of gratitude for Brother Vanunu's courageous acts in exposing the Israeli nuclear arsenal. Such men are dangerous to the imperial order-and we know why. Thanks, Brother. All Honor To Vanunu.
********
This is passed on from the Partisan Defesne Committee.
Workers Vanguard No. 960
4 June 2010
Thrown Back in Prison
Free Vanunu! Let Him Leave Israel!
On May 23, Mordechai Vanunu, the whistle-blower who spent 18 years in prison for exposing the extent of Israel’s nuclear arsenal, began serving a three-month prison sentence that stems from his December 29 arrest for meeting with a Norwegian woman in Jerusalem. Despite serving his entire prior sentence, Vanunu remains barred from talking to non-Israelis and going near airports, ports and embassies, subject to 24-hour surveillance and prevented from leaving the country.
Following his December arrest, Vanunu was sentenced to six months of “community service” in overwhelmingly Jewish West Jerusalem. Fearing his life would be threatened by right-wing Israelis who consider him a “traitor,” Vanunu requested that his sentence be served in predominantly Palestinian East Jerusalem. When the court rejected his request, Vanunu declined to carry out his community service. On May 11, he was sentenced to prison once again.
The vindictive, blood-soaked rulers of the Zionist state will not rest until Vanunu, a former technician at the Israeli nuclear weapons facility in Dimona, is forever silenced for having revealed that Israel had upwards of 200 nuclear warheads. This arsenal, built up with the active support of the French and then the U.S. imperialist powers, was enough not only to incinerate every Arab capital but to bomb major cities in the Soviet Union as well.
Vanunu was born to a Sephardic Jewish family that emigrated from Morocco to Israel, where he experienced discrimination at the hands of the European-derived Ashkenazi establishment. As a student at Beersheba’s Ben-Gurion University, he joined protests against Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and actively fought for the rights of Palestinian and Bedouin students. Fed up with the Israeli garrison state, Vanunu left the country in 1986 and later converted to Christianity while in Australia.
In 1986, he was kidnapped in Italy by the Israeli Mossad secret police, thrown into a desert prison in Ashkelon and sentenced by a secret military court. In prison, Vanunu was given the kind of treatment Israel’s rulers reserve for those they deem “subhuman”—the Palestinians imprisoned within the electric fences that surround Gaza, those confined behind the concrete walls and checkpoints of the West Bank, the thousands who languish in Israel’s prison torture chambers. He spent more than eleven years in solitary confinement, entombed in a six-by-nine cell in a high-security complex built for Palestinians.
When Vanunu walked out of prison in April 2004, he said that he was “proud and happy to do what I did.” He was arrested later that year and, in 2007, he was sentenced to another six months’ imprisonment. He remains defiant, declaring before he was dragged away to his cell last month, “You didn’t get anything from me in 18 years; you won’t get anything in 3 months. Shame on you, Israel.” Defenders of the Palestinian people and opponents of capitalist repression everywhere must take up the call to free this courageous opponent of Zionist terror and demand that he be allowed to leave Israel.
*Writer's Corner-Less than zero: Bret Easton Ellis’s sequel misses- A Guest Book Review
Click on the headline to link to a Sunday Boston Globe, dated July 4, 2010, guest book review of Bret Eason Ellis' latest novel.
Markin comment:
The reason that I am posting this guest review is that the reviewer's (Jay Atkinson) first paragraph hits the nail right on the head about the dearth of sympathetic (or even likable) characters that populate most contemporary literature:
"Sometime in the 1970s, when money and power became mixed up in the counterculture, it all went horribly wrong, in literature and in life. The primary books that celebrate this intriguing aspect of Americana, works by writers like Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, and Jim Carroll — even Whitman and Thoreau — often featured charismatic quasi-hoboes as their protagonists, enlightened seekers in pursuit of “joy, kicks, darkness, music,’’ in Kerouac’s famous expression. These penniless hipsters were not looking for freedom from authority so much as freedom from oppression; for the most part, they were willing to live, and let live."
Does anyone else have that same sense? Or sense of the decline of "hobo" sensibility.
Neal Cassady from Kerouac Denver, "The Brown Buffalo", Oscar Acosta, from Thompson California, Duane from McMurtry Texas, McMurphy from Kesey Oregon, Hell, even Faulkner crazies from Mississippi and Tennessee Williams misfit from all over the South. I could go on. Where have they gone in techno-America? At least they could have left an e-mail address. Right?
Markin comment:
The reason that I am posting this guest review is that the reviewer's (Jay Atkinson) first paragraph hits the nail right on the head about the dearth of sympathetic (or even likable) characters that populate most contemporary literature:
"Sometime in the 1970s, when money and power became mixed up in the counterculture, it all went horribly wrong, in literature and in life. The primary books that celebrate this intriguing aspect of Americana, works by writers like Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, and Jim Carroll — even Whitman and Thoreau — often featured charismatic quasi-hoboes as their protagonists, enlightened seekers in pursuit of “joy, kicks, darkness, music,’’ in Kerouac’s famous expression. These penniless hipsters were not looking for freedom from authority so much as freedom from oppression; for the most part, they were willing to live, and let live."
Does anyone else have that same sense? Or sense of the decline of "hobo" sensibility.
Neal Cassady from Kerouac Denver, "The Brown Buffalo", Oscar Acosta, from Thompson California, Duane from McMurtry Texas, McMurphy from Kesey Oregon, Hell, even Faulkner crazies from Mississippi and Tennessee Williams misfit from all over the South. I could go on. Where have they gone in techno-America? At least they could have left an e-mail address. Right?
Sunday, July 04, 2010
*The Latest From The Lynne Stewart Defense Committee- Free Lynne Stewart (And Her Co-Workers-translator Mohamed Yousry and paralegal Ahmed Abdel) Now!
Click on the headline to link to the Lynne Stewart Defense Committee- Free Lynne Stewart (And Her Co-Workers) Now!
Markin comment:
This is exactly the right day to call for freedom, a real call for freedom in 2010. This is a no brainer- Free our sister and her two co-workers (translator Mohamed Yousry and paralegal Ahmed Abdel Sattar)now!
Markin comment:
This is exactly the right day to call for freedom, a real call for freedom in 2010. This is a no brainer- Free our sister and her two co-workers (translator Mohamed Yousry and paralegal Ahmed Abdel Sattar)now!
Saturday, July 03, 2010
*The Streets Are Not For Dreaming - We Need An All Out Anti-War Push To Get Out Of Afghanistan- And We Need To Start Now
Click on the headline to link to a UJP website entry on the recent House vote to approve an Afghan War supplemental war budget. That's extra dough on top of the "regular" Afghan war budget. We won't even mention the "regular" regular war budget-the 700 billion one.
Markin comment:
Damn right the streets are not for dreaming now. If they ever were, except for a couple of minutes in the 1960s before the American imperial state, Johnson/Nixon version front and center, pulled the hammer down and we barely got off of those streets with our lives. But enough of talk of those ancient times. Enough also, for the moment, of the dreamy 1960s remembrances of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters acid tests, of fast souped up 1950s vintage cars revving up for the Saturday night “chicken run”, of oldies but goodies records from the dawn of rock and roll, of end of the night songs at school dances and what to do when that time comes and you have two left feet, and of other such sentiments that have filled the space of late.
We are at war now. No, not in the way you think, the obvious way, with the Obama version of the American imperial state endlessly pouring men and materials into his Afghan adventure that will stretch out to infinity. We know, and know painfully well, what we have to do in opposition to that adventure. Nor am I speaking of the complacency of a Congress that keeps the fires of the war machine stoked with every appropriation the Obama administration asks for, most recently with the House approval of the “supplemental” Afghan war budget (not to be confused with the “regular” Afghan war budget, or, heavens, with the “regular” regular war budget). We too know how to deal with that.
What we are war with, first and foremost, is the complacency of the genetic anti-war movement, if the scattered remnants, individuals and clots of anti-warriors that we have been reduced to warrant that title. A “movement” that draws many thousands to Detroit for the U.S. Social Forum talk/slugfest but cannot draw that number to the streets of Washington for a protest of a vicious Obama-driven imperial policy is hardly worthy of the name.
There, I got that off my chest. And that’s all I needed to do, for openers. I have been in politics of one kind or another practically all of my conscious life and one thing that I have learned is that you don’t get people, especially political people, moving based on trying to guilt trip them, at least not for the long haul that we need them. And that is my real point. The polls of late, to the extent that they are indicative, point to something of a shift in sentiment (and much else) about Obama's Afghan war policy. American war allies are deserting the ship like rats. The McChrystal expose demonstrated that the generals at the top are still clueless on the question of kicking down every door in some benighted Afghan village to “win” friends. Hell, even the ever so tepid and pliant Congress is beginning to question (theoretically, but not in cold hard cash department) the “mission.”
In short, we are, or should be, in the catbird seat. So, forget the past half-heartedness in the face of earlier “deaf” ears, the fear of breaking with the Obama administration, the fear of alienating the black liberation movement, the fear of… well, you know the rest. Back to the struggle, back to the streets and back to our fighting slogan- Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops And Mercenaries (Not Just General McChrystal) From Afghanistan!
Note: For those who wince at my characterization of the recently held U.S. Social Forum as a talk fest I will give a very compelling reason for that usage. And I will not even mention the various “anti-imperialist”, “anti- capitalist” sources, like the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and who knows who else, that funded this confab. I will make a strictly political point here.
In 2004, a presidential election year and a year when the Democratic Party national convention was held in Boston. That was the year, if you recall, that one Massachusetts U.S. Senator John Forbes Kerry was proclaimed the Democratic nominee. Senator Kerry, if you will also recall, voted with both hands and feet (or was it one hand and one foot) for President George W. Bush’s 2002 Iraq War resolution, among his other sins. Clearly a situation, in any case, for anti-war militants and others to stage a protest, a vocal one to boot, against the Democratic Party and its nominee.
2004 was also a year that, not by chance, that the U.S. Social Forum (made up of many anti-war and progressive organizations and individuals, as least that is what they allege in their written propaganda) was held in Boston at the nearby University of Massachusetts/Boston campus at the same time as the convention. A perfect lash-up for a very strong and well-attended protest (that was set, moreover, the day before the convention started, a Sunday), right?
No such luck. The vast bulk of the attendees at the Forum could not find the time to tear themselves away, for a couple of hours, from some pressing anti-war or anti-imperialist workshop in order to hit the streets. Or, and here is the real crux of the matter, were ordered not to or discouraged from attending that protest by the Forum leadership or their organizations. My group of local anti-war militant and I had political differences with the organizers of the protest (ANSWER) but when the deal when down and a simple anti-war statement had to be made the place for all militants was in front of the Democratic Party Convention Hall chanting our opposition to the Bush/Kerry (now Obama) Iraq and Afghan Wars. Simple right?
Fortunately this year’s Forum was not interrupted by the need to deal with presidential elections; although I would make a very strong case that the not very distant (from Detroit) Toronto meeting of the G-20 could have used a few thousand more protesters, if they could have torn themselves away from those lovely workshops.
Markin comment:
Damn right the streets are not for dreaming now. If they ever were, except for a couple of minutes in the 1960s before the American imperial state, Johnson/Nixon version front and center, pulled the hammer down and we barely got off of those streets with our lives. But enough of talk of those ancient times. Enough also, for the moment, of the dreamy 1960s remembrances of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters acid tests, of fast souped up 1950s vintage cars revving up for the Saturday night “chicken run”, of oldies but goodies records from the dawn of rock and roll, of end of the night songs at school dances and what to do when that time comes and you have two left feet, and of other such sentiments that have filled the space of late.
We are at war now. No, not in the way you think, the obvious way, with the Obama version of the American imperial state endlessly pouring men and materials into his Afghan adventure that will stretch out to infinity. We know, and know painfully well, what we have to do in opposition to that adventure. Nor am I speaking of the complacency of a Congress that keeps the fires of the war machine stoked with every appropriation the Obama administration asks for, most recently with the House approval of the “supplemental” Afghan war budget (not to be confused with the “regular” Afghan war budget, or, heavens, with the “regular” regular war budget). We too know how to deal with that.
What we are war with, first and foremost, is the complacency of the genetic anti-war movement, if the scattered remnants, individuals and clots of anti-warriors that we have been reduced to warrant that title. A “movement” that draws many thousands to Detroit for the U.S. Social Forum talk/slugfest but cannot draw that number to the streets of Washington for a protest of a vicious Obama-driven imperial policy is hardly worthy of the name.
There, I got that off my chest. And that’s all I needed to do, for openers. I have been in politics of one kind or another practically all of my conscious life and one thing that I have learned is that you don’t get people, especially political people, moving based on trying to guilt trip them, at least not for the long haul that we need them. And that is my real point. The polls of late, to the extent that they are indicative, point to something of a shift in sentiment (and much else) about Obama's Afghan war policy. American war allies are deserting the ship like rats. The McChrystal expose demonstrated that the generals at the top are still clueless on the question of kicking down every door in some benighted Afghan village to “win” friends. Hell, even the ever so tepid and pliant Congress is beginning to question (theoretically, but not in cold hard cash department) the “mission.”
In short, we are, or should be, in the catbird seat. So, forget the past half-heartedness in the face of earlier “deaf” ears, the fear of breaking with the Obama administration, the fear of alienating the black liberation movement, the fear of… well, you know the rest. Back to the struggle, back to the streets and back to our fighting slogan- Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops And Mercenaries (Not Just General McChrystal) From Afghanistan!
Note: For those who wince at my characterization of the recently held U.S. Social Forum as a talk fest I will give a very compelling reason for that usage. And I will not even mention the various “anti-imperialist”, “anti- capitalist” sources, like the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, and who knows who else, that funded this confab. I will make a strictly political point here.
In 2004, a presidential election year and a year when the Democratic Party national convention was held in Boston. That was the year, if you recall, that one Massachusetts U.S. Senator John Forbes Kerry was proclaimed the Democratic nominee. Senator Kerry, if you will also recall, voted with both hands and feet (or was it one hand and one foot) for President George W. Bush’s 2002 Iraq War resolution, among his other sins. Clearly a situation, in any case, for anti-war militants and others to stage a protest, a vocal one to boot, against the Democratic Party and its nominee.
2004 was also a year that, not by chance, that the U.S. Social Forum (made up of many anti-war and progressive organizations and individuals, as least that is what they allege in their written propaganda) was held in Boston at the nearby University of Massachusetts/Boston campus at the same time as the convention. A perfect lash-up for a very strong and well-attended protest (that was set, moreover, the day before the convention started, a Sunday), right?
No such luck. The vast bulk of the attendees at the Forum could not find the time to tear themselves away, for a couple of hours, from some pressing anti-war or anti-imperialist workshop in order to hit the streets. Or, and here is the real crux of the matter, were ordered not to or discouraged from attending that protest by the Forum leadership or their organizations. My group of local anti-war militant and I had political differences with the organizers of the protest (ANSWER) but when the deal when down and a simple anti-war statement had to be made the place for all militants was in front of the Democratic Party Convention Hall chanting our opposition to the Bush/Kerry (now Obama) Iraq and Afghan Wars. Simple right?
Fortunately this year’s Forum was not interrupted by the need to deal with presidential elections; although I would make a very strong case that the not very distant (from Detroit) Toronto meeting of the G-20 could have used a few thousand more protesters, if they could have torn themselves away from those lovely workshops.
Friday, July 02, 2010
*From The UJP Website- House Approves Extra Afghan War Budget
Click on the headline to link to a UJP website entry on the recent House vote to approve an Afghan War supplemental war budget. That's extra dough on top of the "regular" Afghan war budget. We won't even mention the "regular" regular war budget- the 700 billion one.
Markin comment:
"...And, speaking of world imperialism, let us keep our eyes on the prize, including the recent news that the beloved House that liberals and reformists see at the last refuge of hope and who just gave away the store on the Supplemental Afghan War budget. Here is our resp one- Obama (and friends in the Congress)- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./ Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan!
Markin comment:
"...And, speaking of world imperialism, let us keep our eyes on the prize, including the recent news that the beloved House that liberals and reformists see at the last refuge of hope and who just gave away the store on the Supplemental Afghan War budget. Here is our resp one- Obama (and friends in the Congress)- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./ Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan!
*From "The Rag Blog" -In Honor Of Class- War Prisoner Marilyn Buck- A Report
Click on the headline to link to a "The Rag Blog" entry on the recent celebration/benefit for class-war prisoner Marilyn Buck.
Thursday, September 27, 2007 Bob Feldman
`Marilyn Buck'
Way out in California
Is where they have her locked
For she is strong and beautiful
And her name is Marilyn Buck.
They sentenced her to eighty years
Because she is morally tough
Her rebel soul they cannot break
And her name is Marilyn Buck.
From Texas to Chicago
The War she tried to stop
She fought alongside Black comrades
And her name is Marilyn Buck.
Assata Shakur, from prison freed,
Did give them all a shock
And another rebel they could not find
Her name was Marilyn Buck.
The Capitol bombed, where the Congress met
To finance CIA plots
And one of the resisters charged
Her name was Marilyn Buck.
Political prisoners still locked up
The list is very long
There’s Mutulu Shakur and Sekou Odinga
And each one deserves their own song.
There’s Sundiata Acoli and Mumia
And Herman Bell and Robert Seth Hayes
And Jamil Al-Amin and the Africas
And Carlos Alberto Torres.
So if you get discouraged
And wish you had more luck
Remember the freedom fighters
And the soulful Marilyn Buck.
Yes, way out in California
Is where they have her locked
For she is strong and beautiful
And her name is Marilyn Buck.
To listen to this protest folk song, you can go to the following music site link:
http://www.last.fm/music/Bob+A.+Feldman/Biographical+Folk+Songs/Marilyn+Buck
The Marilyn Buck protest folk song is sung to the tune of the traditional folk song, “Mary Hamilton.” Marilyn Buck ( http://www.prisonactivist.org/pps+pows/marilynbuck/ is currently imprisoned in the Pleasanton federal prison in Dublin, California. For more information about the current situation of U.S. political prisoners like Mutulu Shakur, Sekou Odinga, Sundiata Acoli, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Herman Bell, Robert Seth Hayes, Jamil Al-Amin (f/k/a H.Rap Brown), the Africas and Carlos Alberto Torres, you can check out the Jericho Amnesty Movement site at http://www.thejerichomovement.com/ and the Prison Activist Resource Center at www.prisonactivist.org/pps+pows/ .
Thursday, September 27, 2007 Bob Feldman
`Marilyn Buck'
Way out in California
Is where they have her locked
For she is strong and beautiful
And her name is Marilyn Buck.
They sentenced her to eighty years
Because she is morally tough
Her rebel soul they cannot break
And her name is Marilyn Buck.
From Texas to Chicago
The War she tried to stop
She fought alongside Black comrades
And her name is Marilyn Buck.
Assata Shakur, from prison freed,
Did give them all a shock
And another rebel they could not find
Her name was Marilyn Buck.
The Capitol bombed, where the Congress met
To finance CIA plots
And one of the resisters charged
Her name was Marilyn Buck.
Political prisoners still locked up
The list is very long
There’s Mutulu Shakur and Sekou Odinga
And each one deserves their own song.
There’s Sundiata Acoli and Mumia
And Herman Bell and Robert Seth Hayes
And Jamil Al-Amin and the Africas
And Carlos Alberto Torres.
So if you get discouraged
And wish you had more luck
Remember the freedom fighters
And the soulful Marilyn Buck.
Yes, way out in California
Is where they have her locked
For she is strong and beautiful
And her name is Marilyn Buck.
To listen to this protest folk song, you can go to the following music site link:
http://www.last.fm/music/Bob+A.+Feldman/Biographical+Folk+Songs/Marilyn+Buck
The Marilyn Buck protest folk song is sung to the tune of the traditional folk song, “Mary Hamilton.” Marilyn Buck ( http://www.prisonactivist.org/pps+pows/marilynbuck/ is currently imprisoned in the Pleasanton federal prison in Dublin, California. For more information about the current situation of U.S. political prisoners like Mutulu Shakur, Sekou Odinga, Sundiata Acoli, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Herman Bell, Robert Seth Hayes, Jamil Al-Amin (f/k/a H.Rap Brown), the Africas and Carlos Alberto Torres, you can check out the Jericho Amnesty Movement site at http://www.thejerichomovement.com/ and the Prison Activist Resource Center at www.prisonactivist.org/pps+pows/ .
Thursday, July 01, 2010
*Coming Of Age In The 1950s, Period- Oldies But Goodies - An Encore
Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of Betty Everett performing here classic rock number,"It's In His Kiss". Oh, ya.
CD Review
Oldies But Goodies, Volume Three, Original Sound Record Co., 1987
I have been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s, but here when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing. No question that those of us who came of age in the 1950s are truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents, please.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all music that your parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, or, hopefully, at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.
Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. And, here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me, or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. But that fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.
So what still sounds good on this CD compilation to a current AARPer and, and perhaps some of his fellows who comprise the demographic that such a 1950s compilation “speak” to. Of course, Come Go With Me by the Dell Vikings, Betty Everett’s It’s In His Kiss and the savage drum line of Frankie Ford’s Sea Cruise. But what about Jerry Butler’s gospel-tinged For Your Precious Love? Yes, I know, this is one of the slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven that you didn’t destroy your partner's shoes and feet. Well, one learns a few social skills in this world for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for she) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
************
It's In His Kiss
Does he love me, I wanna know
How can I tell if he loves me so
Is it in his eyes, oh no you'll be deceived
Is it in his eyes, oh no he'll make believe
If you wanna know, if he loves you so
It's in his kiss
That's where it is, oh yeah
Or is it in his face, oh no it's just his charm
In his warm embrace, oh no that's just his arm
If you wanna know, if he loves you so
It's in his kiss
That's where it is, oh it's in his kiss
That's where it is, oh-oh
Kiss him and squeeze him tight
And find out what you wanna know
If it's love, if it really is
It's there in his kiss
How 'bout the way he acts, oh no that's not the way
And you're not listening to all I say
If you wanna know, if he loves you so
It's in his kiss, that's where it is
Oh yeah it's in his kiss, that's where it is
Oh-oh, kiss him and squeeze him tight
And find out what you wanna know
If it's love, if it really is
It's there in his kiss
How 'bout the way he acts, oh no that's not the way
And you're not listening to all I say
If you wanna know, if he loves you so
It's in his kiss
That's where it is, oh yeah it's in his kiss
That's where it is, oh it's in his kiss
CD Review
Oldies But Goodies, Volume Three, Original Sound Record Co., 1987
I have been doing a series of commentaries elsewhere on another site on my coming of political age in the early 1960s, but here when I am writing about musical influences I am just speaking of my coming of age, period, which was not necessarily the same thing. No question that those of us who came of age in the 1950s are truly children of rock and roll. We were there, whether we appreciated it or not at the time, when the first, sputtering, musical moves away from ballady Broadway show tunes and rhymey Tin Pan Alley pieces hit the radio airwaves. (If you do not know what a radio is then ask your parents or, ouch, grandparents, please.) And, most importantly, we were there when the music moved away from any and all music that your parents might have approved of, or maybe, even liked, or, hopefully, at least left you alone to play in peace up in your room when rock and roll hit post- World War II America teenagers like, well, like an atomic bomb.
Not all of the material put forth was good, nor was all of it destined to be playable fifty or sixty years later on some “greatest hits” compilation but some of songs had enough chordal energy, lyrical sense, and sheer danceability to make any Jack or Jill jump then, or now. And, here is the good part, especially for painfully shy guys like me, or those who, like me as well, had two left feet on the dance floor. You didn’t need to dance toe to toe, close to close, with that certain she (or he for shes). Just be alive…uh, hip to the music. Otherwise you might become the dreaded wallflower. But that fear, the fear of fears that haunted many a teenage dream then, is a story for another day. Let’s just leave it at this for now. Ah, to be very, very young then was very heaven.
So what still sounds good on this CD compilation to a current AARPer and, and perhaps some of his fellows who comprise the demographic that such a 1950s compilation “speak” to. Of course, Come Go With Me by the Dell Vikings, Betty Everett’s It’s In His Kiss and the savage drum line of Frankie Ford’s Sea Cruise. But what about Jerry Butler’s gospel-tinged For Your Precious Love? Yes, I know, this is one of the slow ones that you had to dance close on. And just hope, hope to high heaven that you didn’t destroy your partner's shoes and feet. Well, one learns a few social skills in this world for no other reason that to “impress” that certain she (or he for she) mentioned above. I did, didn’t you?
************
It's In His Kiss
Does he love me, I wanna know
How can I tell if he loves me so
Is it in his eyes, oh no you'll be deceived
Is it in his eyes, oh no he'll make believe
If you wanna know, if he loves you so
It's in his kiss
That's where it is, oh yeah
Or is it in his face, oh no it's just his charm
In his warm embrace, oh no that's just his arm
If you wanna know, if he loves you so
It's in his kiss
That's where it is, oh it's in his kiss
That's where it is, oh-oh
Kiss him and squeeze him tight
And find out what you wanna know
If it's love, if it really is
It's there in his kiss
How 'bout the way he acts, oh no that's not the way
And you're not listening to all I say
If you wanna know, if he loves you so
It's in his kiss, that's where it is
Oh yeah it's in his kiss, that's where it is
Oh-oh, kiss him and squeeze him tight
And find out what you wanna know
If it's love, if it really is
It's there in his kiss
How 'bout the way he acts, oh no that's not the way
And you're not listening to all I say
If you wanna know, if he loves you so
It's in his kiss
That's where it is, oh yeah it's in his kiss
That's where it is, oh it's in his kiss
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
*I Feel Those Appalachian Mountain Breezes Again- I Hear Those Lonesome Fiddles- A CD Review
Click on the headline to link ota "YouTube" film clip of one of the fiddlers on the CD under review, J.P. Fraley. Sorry, I could not find "Annadeene's Waltz" mentioned below for you to hear here.
CD Review
The Art Of Traditional Fiddle: From The North American Tradition Series, Rounder Records, 2001
Over the past couple of years my interest in mountain music, the music that formed part of my parental heritage, has increased as a quick search of such entries in this space attest to. Those reviews have run the gamut from the famous, and important, work of the various Carter Family combinations (and generations) to the "discovery" by the folk revivalists of the 1960s of the likes of banjo player Roscoe Holcomb to the interest by urban folk artists of that period like the Greenbriar Boys and The New Lost City Ramblers. One of the driving forces of that simple, plain music is the banjo; another is, as under review here, the fiddle.
Today, in this space, I am also reviewing a tribute album celebrating the 10th Anniversary of Appleseed Records (2007), now a fixture in preserving folk and protest music. I mentioned there that certain record labels have gained a niche for themselves in music history by establishing, driving, or preserving certain traditions. That is the case here with Rounder Records who for over forty years has put together off-beat, but extremely valuable, compilations of traditional music from the shores of Cape Breton to Appalachia to Western America.
In the Appleseed review I noted that for the history of the label there is a more than informative booklet that came with that 2-disc CD set, including plenty of discology-type information about each track. For this CD there is also a very informative booklet (as is usual with Rounder products), also including plenty of discology-type information about each track. That leaves the final question of what is good here. That is a harder question than usual in that everything here is an instrumental featuring the fiddle so it is driven more by mood than anything else. The mood, as described in the headline- mountain breezes and lonesome fiddles. And you should think of this compilation that way as well, especially as some of the pieces are very short. The one that you MUST listen and that kind of evokes everything I am trying to describe is J.P. Fraley's "Annadeene's Waltz". Heaven by fiddle.
CD Review
The Art Of Traditional Fiddle: From The North American Tradition Series, Rounder Records, 2001
Over the past couple of years my interest in mountain music, the music that formed part of my parental heritage, has increased as a quick search of such entries in this space attest to. Those reviews have run the gamut from the famous, and important, work of the various Carter Family combinations (and generations) to the "discovery" by the folk revivalists of the 1960s of the likes of banjo player Roscoe Holcomb to the interest by urban folk artists of that period like the Greenbriar Boys and The New Lost City Ramblers. One of the driving forces of that simple, plain music is the banjo; another is, as under review here, the fiddle.
Today, in this space, I am also reviewing a tribute album celebrating the 10th Anniversary of Appleseed Records (2007), now a fixture in preserving folk and protest music. I mentioned there that certain record labels have gained a niche for themselves in music history by establishing, driving, or preserving certain traditions. That is the case here with Rounder Records who for over forty years has put together off-beat, but extremely valuable, compilations of traditional music from the shores of Cape Breton to Appalachia to Western America.
In the Appleseed review I noted that for the history of the label there is a more than informative booklet that came with that 2-disc CD set, including plenty of discology-type information about each track. For this CD there is also a very informative booklet (as is usual with Rounder products), also including plenty of discology-type information about each track. That leaves the final question of what is good here. That is a harder question than usual in that everything here is an instrumental featuring the fiddle so it is driven more by mood than anything else. The mood, as described in the headline- mountain breezes and lonesome fiddles. And you should think of this compilation that way as well, especially as some of the pieces are very short. The one that you MUST listen and that kind of evokes everything I am trying to describe is J.P. Fraley's "Annadeene's Waltz". Heaven by fiddle.
*As Obama Wades Neck Deep In The "Big Poppy"- A Cautionary Tale- Pete Seeger's ""Waist Deep In The Big Muddy"- An Encore
Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of Pete Seeger performing his classic anti-war song, "Waist Deep In The Big Muddy".
Markin comment:
In a week where American President Obama has indeed entrenched himself deeper in Afghanistan (the "Big Poppy") and has gone out of his way, way out of his way, to make it his own "splendid little war" this song seems very, very appropriate.
Pete Seeger Lyrics
Waist Deep In The Big Muddy Lyrics
It was back in nineteen forty-two,
I was a member of a good platoon.
We were on maneuvers in-a Loozianna,
One night by the light of the moon.
The captain told us to ford a river,
That's how it all begun.
We were -- knee deep in the Big Muddy,
But the big fool said to push on.
The Sergeant said, "Sir, are you sure,
This is the best way back to the base?"
"Sergeant, go on! I forded this river
'Bout a mile above this place.
It'll be a little soggy but just keep slogging.
We'll soon be on dry ground."
We were -- waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool said to push on.
The Sergeant said, "Sir, with all this equipment
No man will be able to swim."
"Sergeant, don't be a Nervous Nellie,"
The Captain said to him.
"All we need is a little determination;
Men, follow me, I'll lead on."
We were -- neck deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool said to push on.
All at once, the moon clouded over,
We heard a gurgling cry.
A few seconds later, the captain's helmet
Was all that floated by.
The Sergeant said, "Turn around men!
I'm in charge from now on."
And we just made it out of the Big Muddy
With the captain dead and gone.
We stripped and dived and found his body
Stuck in the old quicksand.
I guess he didn't know that the water was deeper
Than the place he'd once before been.
Another stream had joined the Big Muddy
'Bout a half mile from where we'd gone.
We were lucky to escape from the Big Muddy
When the big fool said to push on.
Well, I'm not going to point any moral;
I'll leave that for yourself
Maybe you're still walking, you're still talking
You'd like to keep your health.
But every time I read the papers
That old feeling comes on;
We're -- waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep! Neck deep! Soon even a
Tall man'll be over his head, we're
Waist deep in the Big Muddy!
And the big fool says to push on!
Markin comment:
In a week where American President Obama has indeed entrenched himself deeper in Afghanistan (the "Big Poppy") and has gone out of his way, way out of his way, to make it his own "splendid little war" this song seems very, very appropriate.
Pete Seeger Lyrics
Waist Deep In The Big Muddy Lyrics
It was back in nineteen forty-two,
I was a member of a good platoon.
We were on maneuvers in-a Loozianna,
One night by the light of the moon.
The captain told us to ford a river,
That's how it all begun.
We were -- knee deep in the Big Muddy,
But the big fool said to push on.
The Sergeant said, "Sir, are you sure,
This is the best way back to the base?"
"Sergeant, go on! I forded this river
'Bout a mile above this place.
It'll be a little soggy but just keep slogging.
We'll soon be on dry ground."
We were -- waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool said to push on.
The Sergeant said, "Sir, with all this equipment
No man will be able to swim."
"Sergeant, don't be a Nervous Nellie,"
The Captain said to him.
"All we need is a little determination;
Men, follow me, I'll lead on."
We were -- neck deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool said to push on.
All at once, the moon clouded over,
We heard a gurgling cry.
A few seconds later, the captain's helmet
Was all that floated by.
The Sergeant said, "Turn around men!
I'm in charge from now on."
And we just made it out of the Big Muddy
With the captain dead and gone.
We stripped and dived and found his body
Stuck in the old quicksand.
I guess he didn't know that the water was deeper
Than the place he'd once before been.
Another stream had joined the Big Muddy
'Bout a half mile from where we'd gone.
We were lucky to escape from the Big Muddy
When the big fool said to push on.
Well, I'm not going to point any moral;
I'll leave that for yourself
Maybe you're still walking, you're still talking
You'd like to keep your health.
But every time I read the papers
That old feeling comes on;
We're -- waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep! Neck deep! Soon even a
Tall man'll be over his head, we're
Waist deep in the Big Muddy!
And the big fool says to push on!
*From “The Rag Blog”- “Bob Feldman 68” Blog- A People’s History Of Afghanistan, Part Twelve
Click on the headline to link to a “The Rag Blog” entry from the “Bob Feldman 68” blog on the history of Afghanistan
Markin comment:
This is a great series for those who are not familiar with the critical role of Afghanistan in world politics, if not directly then as part of the history of world imperialism. Thanks, Bob Feldman.
And, speaking of world imperialism, let us keep our eyes on the prize- Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./ Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan!
Markin comment:
This is a great series for those who are not familiar with the critical role of Afghanistan in world politics, if not directly then as part of the history of world imperialism. Thanks, Bob Feldman.
And, speaking of world imperialism, let us keep our eyes on the prize- Obama- Immediate, Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./ Allied Troops And Mercenaries From Afghanistan!
Monday, June 28, 2010
*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Gays And The SWP (American Socialist Workers Party)
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1982 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
****************
Seduced and Abandoned: The Politics of Opportunism
Gays and the SWP
"Tinkerbell Meets Trotsky: The Revolution Betrayed": With this smirking title as a come-on, Boston's Cay Community News (19 September 1981) reviewed two collections of Socialist Workers Party (SWP) internal documents on gay liberation recently published by gay activists to scandalize the SWP. The document collections, Cay Liberation and Socialism (published by David Thorstad) and No Apologies (published by Scott Forgione and Kurt Hill, with an introduction by Thorstad), cover the SWP's gyrations on the gay question from 1970 to 1979. Thorstad, Forgione and Hill are all ex-SWP members who want to expose the SWP's "betrayal" of gay lifestylist politics. In this they certainly succeed. They and the Cay Community News reviewer, Scott Tucker, an anarchist/gay liberationist, use the sorry story of SWP hypocrisy to denounce Trotskyism as an enemy of freedom for homosexuals.
But the SWP has not had anything in common with Trotskyism for a long time! The authentic Trotskyist tendency in this country, the Spartacist League, has never wavered in its commitment to opposing anti-gay backwardness and the brutal enforcement of sexual puritanism by the capitalist state. From our very inception as an organization and long before the advent of a "gay liberation movement" (and at a time when the SWP was still forcing gay members to resign!), the Spartacist League has fought against all victimization and persecution of homosexuals. But Thorstad & Co. would prefer not to acknowledge our record because their aim is to show that only those who see themselves as gay activists first and foremost can be relied on to defend the democratic rights of homosexuals.
Our commitment to gay rights has never meant patronizing acceptance of gay activists' lifestylist illusions. The Spartacist League has always argued against the dangerously Utopian belief that in this violent, class-divided society "only gays can liberate themselves." On the contrary, only socialist revolution can lay the basis for finally uprooting sick prejudices against "sexual deviance," through providing social alternatives to the stifling monogamous family, the main social institution oppressing women, children and homosexuals. Our aim is not a sectoralist "gay movement" but a revolutionary party based on the working class to lead the struggles of all the oppressed—and in which the best fighters from all sectors of the oppressed will be, not narrow representatives of "their people," but communist revolutionaries.
Lenin's exhortation in What Is To Be Done? (1903) guides our work:
"The Social-Democrat's ideal should not be the trade-union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects... who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat." Our principled approach to these questions has attracted to the Spartacist League some of the best elements of the New Left-derived gay liberation milieu, most notably the Los Angeles-based Red Flag Union (formerly Lavender & Red Union), with whom we fused in 1977 (see W&R No. 16, Winter 1977-78, which discusses the key political issues—defense of the Soviet Union, rejection of lifestylism—which laid the programmatic basis for the fusion).
By contrast, the SWP documents published by Thorstad, Forgione and Hill are a testament to the proposition that opportunism doesn't pay. The value of the SWP documents is not, as Thorstad maintains, that they are "the most important such debates ever to occur inside any left-wing group" or that they will prove "essential" to resolving the question of the relationship between the fight against homosexual oppression and the fight for socialism. They are, however, useful for the light they shed on the grotesque zig-zags and utter cynicism of the reformist SWP. That today the SWP now dismisses Thorstad and his "North American Man/Boy Love Association"— currently being victimized by a state witchhunt—as virtual child molesters, as part of the current SWP policy of benign neglect of gay rights, is not merely evidence of their adaptation to homophobia.
The method behind this history of flirtation with and abandonment of this specially oppressed sector is the same tailist approach the SWP brought to what they called the "autonomous mass movements" of feminists, black nationalists, Chicano nationalists, etc. With the proliferation of "do-it-yourself liberation" currents in the late 1960s/early 1970s, the SWP with consummate cynicism authored the proposition that "consistent" anythingism equals socialism and jumped on the gay bandwagon. When the lifestyle radical mood receded the SWP backed away from the gay question. Ultimately, the SWP rediscovered the working class and with predictable opportunist logic decided to "turn" to the unions by pandering to some of the most backward attitudes prevalent among workers, as for example through Barnes & Co.'s despicable defense of anti-homosexual "age of consent" laws.
If we can share the disgust of Thorstad et al. with the SWP's wretched politics, it is for very different reasons. There is a political chasm dividing the petty-bourgeois politics of gay community lifestylism from Marxism. Thorstad at least, has drawn the conclusion from his experiences in and out of the SWP that Marxism has nothing to say to homosexuals: "For years, gay socialists have been trying to develop a synthesis between homosexuality and socialism— After a decade of effort, I am ready to draw the conclusion that the left has failed to meet the challenge of gay liberation." He concludes his introduction to No Apologies by quoting an earlier gay liberationism Kurt Hiller, "The liberation of homosexuals can only be the work of homosexuals
themselves."
Spartacist League/ Spartacus Youth League contingent in Los Angeles march against anti-homosexual Briggs Initiative, July 1978.
Hill and Forgione (now, respectively, a supporter of the social-democratic Workers Power group and a staff member of Cay Community News) still present themselves as Marxists—of a sort. Littering their own documents with dozens of cutesy-poo illustrations (a cartoon of Lenin, Brezhnev and Trotsky in a gay bath), they conclude their foreword to No Apologies with the slogans "For an understanding of Michael Mouse-Lennonism too!" and "In defense of campy socialists as well as the socialist camp!" Is this the sort of treatment they think will serve "to further a Marxist perspective" on the gay question?
Tucker is an, unabashed anti-Marxist, an anarchist whose sense of political reality is best illustrated by his comment, "The SWP leadership has no sense of proportion if it really believes that transvestism is so much more exotic and eccentric to the masses than Trotskyism itself"! The entire point of his lengthy review is to use the SWP in order to write off "all 57 varieties of Marxism-Leninism" as "unfit for human consumption."
There is, however, a revolutionary alternative to Tucker's anarcho-lifestylism, Thorstad's advocacy of an autonomous gay movement, and Forgiohe/Hill's Mickey-Mouse "Marxism." To develop this theme, it is necessary to delve a little deeper into the SWP's slimy record and into the politics of gay liberationism.
The SWP in the '60s: "Gay is Good"...Maybe
As part of the SWP's political degeneration in the 1960s the organization adopted an unofficial policy of excluding homosexuals. As SWP honcho Jack Barnes admitted in a report to the Political Committee (the SWP top leadership) in November 1970, "Since the early 1960s the party and YSA [Young Socialist Alliance] have been moving toward a policy which proscribes homosexuals from membership" (quoted in Gay Liberation and Socialism, p. 5).
In its earlier revolutionary days the SWP leadership, in particular founding leader James P. Cannon, had a far different attitude. In his contribution to the commemorative book James P. Cannon As We Knew Him, longtime SWP leader Sam Gordon recalled the case of "a young leader of the organization ...[who] had fallen afoul of the New York homosexual laws, and was clapped into jail one day early in the thirties." Cannon, Gordon recalled, got the comrade out. "The case was finally quashed. Our comrade continued to be a leading member...." But in the 1960s the SWP was sloughing off simple decency, as well as revolutionary principles, in its pursuit of success on the cheap.
The hallmark of that New Left era was the SWP's vigorous attempt to mimic and adapt to black nationalism, feminism, Chicano nationalism (the mythical land of "Aztlan") and virtually every other "mass movement"—most importantly the liberal-bourgeois anti-war movement. As Barnes said, "The consistent and irreconcilable liberation struggle of an oppressed nationality is our struggle. If it is irreconcilable and consistent, then it will point toward socialism..." (speech to 1970 SWP convention). As applied to feminism et al. this became "consistent (fill in the blank) will lead to socialism." It was only a matter of time until Barnes & Co. discovered gay liberation. And if "Black is Beautiful" and "Sisterhood is Powerful" became, in the SWP's eyes, "socialist" slogans—then why not "Gay is Good"? Tucker indignantly raises this very point, and indeed, by the SWP's own logic, there's no reason they shouldn't have adopted this equally meaningless slogan as well.
However, there was a layer of SWP "old guard" conservatives, trade-union oriented and socially conservative, who, while they dared not challenge feminism and black nationalism so openly, found the gay movement hard to swallow. By the time the SWP got geared up to drop its ban on homosexual members and mount an intervention into the gay movement, that movement itself was already showing signs of dying down. Spring 1971 was the height of the SWP's brief infatuation with gay liberation: they mobilized heavily for gay marches and for a gay contingent in the April antiwar peace crawl in Washington. The Militant ran gay-oriented articles (many authored by Thorstad) in virtually every issue.
But as Thorstad later recalled, "The party's involvement had hardly begun when the brakes began to be applied" (Gay Liberator, December 1974-January 1975). In May 1971 the SWP announced a "probe" into the gay liberation movement that, in hindsight, was really the beginning of a withdrawal from it. The following year saw a lengthy literary discussion in the SWP's internal bulletin, which forms the bulk of the documents in Thorstad's collection. This concluded with the 1973 SWP convention where a "Memorandum on the Gay Liberation Movement" outlined the Barnes gang's intention to drop gay lib politics.
Without rejecting the sectoralist method which had led the SWP to briefly tail the gay movement, the Memo basically concluded that there was not enough of a movement to tail. This reality was covered with some orthodox Marxist phrases about taking no position on whether gay was better,, worse, or just as good as straight. The gay question, the Memo said, was simply a question of democratic rights, not (as gay activists would have it) a broader struggle to liberate everyone's sexual nature. And in a revealing aside on just how far lifestylist counter-culturalism had been allowed to flower inside the SWP, the Memo authors felt obliged to note that male comrades should not wear dresses and that "sexual activities... have no place at party socials." ,
The Memo, although it praised the gay liberation movement (with the exception of its "ultraleft" [sic] sector), naturally enough was seen as a gross betrayal by the gay liberationists recruited during the SWP's Spring fling, and especially by chief gay spokesman David Thorstad. A wave of quits predictably followed. As Thorstad explained in his December 1973 resignation statement: "It [the Memo] has made it impossible for gays to reconcile their commitment to gay liberation with party membership" (Cay Liberation and Socialism, p. 127).
Anita Bryant and "The Turn"
The SWP dumped the gay movement in '73 mainly because there didn't seem to be a lot of recruits to gain. There was also an element of concession to conservative SWP leaders like Tom Kerry and Nat Weinstein. So it was not unexpected that when, in 1977, Anita Bryant's hate campaign against homosexuals provoked a brief spate of massive demonstrations in U.S. cities, it also provoked a renewed interest in the gay movement in the SWP. SWP leader Doug Jenness authored a "clarification" on the '73 Memo, writing that "...we solidarize with the sentiment of the gay liberation movement that 'gay is good'" interpreting this not as advocacy of homosexuality (which of course it was!) but as a statement that "gay people are just as good as heterosexual people" (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 35, No. 5, 11 June 1977). An SWP gay oppositionist wrote that "since the June 7 Miami referendum, differences over the party's tactical orientation to the gay movement have been completely superceded by dramatic events—The party has responded in a revolutionary fashion to the latest upsurge of the gay movement" (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 35, No. 11, 9 July 1977).
But no sooner had the mass marches ceased than SWP interest in the gay movement ceased. Simultaneously, having watched the black nationalist, feminist, antiwar and other New Left movements die off in the 1970s, the SWP suddenly discovered the working class. That is to say, Barnes & Co. found something new to tail: the liberal wing of the trade-union bureaucracy. The very same people who had been the architects of what they now called the "long detour" from the working class into the various "independent mass movements" of the oppressed now began declaiming the elementary Marxist concept that the working class alone has the social weight to make socialist revolution and serve as the liberator of all the oppressed. Cynical? Certainly. Dishonest? By all means. This "turn" meant not only the end of the SWP's dabbling with gay lifestylist politics, but an adaptation to the most backward attitudes, not just among the working class, but increasingly to new moods of conservatism being enforced by a reactionary bourgeois backlash against the "permissive" 1960s.
In part in a drive to ingratiate themselves with liberal union reformers like Ed Sadlowski of the Steelworkers and Arnold Miller of the Mine Workers, the Barnes leadership sought to purge the SWP of its more flagrantly non-"proletarian" elements. Flamboyant gay liberationists were on the top of the list. It only remained to find a reasonable excuse to publicly ditch the gay orientation. In February 1979 an excuse was found—age-of-consent laws and the turn of part of the gay movement (Thorstad in particular) to the explosive issue of "cross-generational" sex and rights for gay youth.
At a Philadelphia conference to plan for a national gay march on Washington, SWPers took an active part. One of the demands raised was "full rights for gay youth, including revision of age-of-consent laws" (later watered down to "protection for lesbian and gay youth ..."). Little more than a month later the Militant (13 April 1979) ran a major article, "The Class-Struggle Road to Winning Gay Rights," in order to reject the march on Washington and blast the very existence of a "so-called gay movement defined by sexuality." The most vicious thrust was a direct attack on Thorstad for having "foisted" the issue of "man-boy love" on the gay movement.
"The repeal of age-of-consent laws is a reactionary demand..." proclaimed the SWP; "saying that children have the 'right' to 'consent' to sex with adults is exactly like saying children should be able to 'consent' to work in a garment factory twelve hours a day." The Militant even rejected '"non-abusive consensual' sex by adults with children": "Laws designed to protect children from sexual and economic exploitation by adults are historic acquisitions of the working class and should be enforced." The SWP refused to mobilize for the Washington march they had helped to plan. Forgione and Hill fought a losing battle against the new direction internally while Michael Maggi, a former co-thinker of Thorstad's who had seen the light in 1973 and become a loyal Barnesite, termed Thorstad a "baby-fucker" and ordered gay literature in the SWP's New York City bookstore thrown out, according to No Apologies.
The issue of age-of-consent laws (or rather, the frightening, still socially taboo issue of childhood sexuality) is inflammatory. Nonetheless, opposition to such laws must be elementary for defenders of democratic rights for youth, whatever their sexual orientation. As Young Spartacus (Summer 1979) put it:
"Revolutionaries, unlike the social-democratic SWP, oppose any and all legal restrictions by the capitalist state on effectively consensual sexual activity. Get the cops out of the bedrooms! We know that such measures are not designed to protect children but to enforce the sexual morality of the nuclear family, which is at the root of the oppression of women, youth and homosexuals "Those who, like the SWP, join the reactionary chorus calling for the capitalist state to enforce the sexual codes based on the morality of the bourgeois family only help to prop up a key bastion of child abuse and one of the strongest pillars of capitalist oppression."
"Gay Liberation" and Marxism
While Forgione and Hill were making their last stand for gay lifestylism in the SWP, they attempted to claim that the Barnes leadership was going the way of the "sectarian" Spartacist League. As Hill wrote:
"The party leadership appears to have capitulated to the sectarian-workerist traits which we used to blast in our opponents. We ridiculed the 'class struggle' formalism of the sectarians such as the Spartacist League who charged that our attitude toward struggles such as women's liberation and Black liberation was'petty-bourgeois.'We encouraged the developments of these and other mass movements for social change."
—SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 36, No. 22,12
July 1979
In some ways Forgione and Hill were simply the most consistent defenders of the SWP's course throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. "Key terms used in the past/' they wrote, "such as 'best builders' of the 'independent mass struggles/ are giving way to the 'worker-Bolsheviks' of 'labor's strategic line of march'....the party is beginning to drift away from the theoretical acquisitions of the past, 20 years" (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 36, No. 22).
Quite so. But what Forgione and Hill cannot comprehend is that what they term "theoretical acquisitions" had been simply opportunist rationales for tailing petty-bourgeois, self-boosting, mutually-conflicting "mass movements" and that Barnes' "turn" was not toward genuine Trotskyism but toward tailing a new "mass movement"—labor reformism.
What unites all the somewhat disparate elements in the "gay community" is a common commitment to the politics of the gay lifestyle. To the gay liberationist, at bottom simply being openly homosexual is in itself a political act. To the "socialist" gay liberationist, it is even revolutionary. As Forgione put it: "It has been through this struggle for self-affirmation as-an equal human being ('coming out') that has led increasing numbers of lesbians and gay men... to become quite convinced that this society is sick and has to be either radically changed or replaced" (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 36, No. 17, 9 July 1979).
"Coming out" is obviously a personal decision—and one which, given the realities of life in this society, has potentially serious consequences. But for the New Left and its various spin-offs, the personal is political. Quoting anarchist Gustav Landauer in his review, Scott Tucker is quite explicit that the revolution is accomplished by living a revolutionary lifestyle: "The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently."
Would that it were so easy to create a new society! The state happens to enforce its morality and its exploitative form of production, with cops, courts, prisons—internationally with MX missiles and armies— and those who go against it are going to get attacked.
The best proof that gay liberation is a petty-bourgeois ideology is that an openly gay lifestyle in a "gay community" is only possible in severely restricted and largely middle-class "gay ghettoes"—West Hollywood, Castro Street, the West Village. What about gay men and lesbians who do not or cannot move to one of these gay islands in a sea of "patriarchal capitalism"? Cay liberation has no answer.
In fact, Forgione and Hill revealed their own petty-bourgeois biases by their violent resistance to the SWP's "turn" to the working class. They took offense when SWP leaders implied that gays were a petty-bourgeois species, and insisted that there are gay workers too. But when it came time to reach out to their "brothers" in the steel and auto plants, Forgione and Hill seemed strangely reluctant. This is not to give any credence to the Barnes gang's "proletarian" credentials, but Forgione and Hill seem to assume that the only role for homosexual socialists is doing "gay work" in the "gay community."
Can homosexuals, as Thorstad insists, liberate themselves? Here the question of "social weight," referred to ad nauseum in the SWP documents, rears its head. For all that the Socialist Workers Party used this concept simply cynically, nonetheless they have a point—and one on which the Spartacist League insisted while Barnes & Co. were hopping on and off the gay liberation bandwagon. We are for "the sexual liberation of everybody"—however, we certainly do not intend to legislate the sexual behavior of future generations by putting our "seal of approval" on any particular sexual mode in this necessarily deforming society—gay, straight, mixed, whatever. That is why we pose our demands in the sexual-personal area negatively: against moralistic state legislation of sexuality. • But more immediately, changing this society means a struggle for power—which means creating a powerful mass party rooted in the working class, which alone has the cohesiveness and social weight, because it produces this society's wealth, to make a socialist revolution. To eliminate the oppression of homosexuals, rooted in the sexual morality of the bourgeois family, it will ultimately be necessary to replace the family with other cooperative institutions in a socialist society. The immediate aftermath of socialist revolution will wipe out all discriminatory laws and criminal sanctions against "deviant" sexual behavior. But a more fundamental transformation is required to change deeply-rooted, ancient attitudes toward sex roles and sexuality. We don't think this is an easy, or simply resolved, question by any means. Nonetheless, the ultimate goal of Marxism has always been the creation of a society in which every individual can develop his potential to the utmost, freed of economic compulsion and attendent psychological miseries.
The job of revolutionaries is to forge a revolutionary vanguard party which can, as Lenin said, serve as a "tribune of the people," fighting all forms of oppression as part of the necessary education of the proletariat in assuming its leading role in the creation of a new society. In the end the "best builders" of rights and freedom for homosexuals will be those who, whatever their sexual orientation, are builders of such a party.
The following is an article from the Spring 1982 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
****************
Seduced and Abandoned: The Politics of Opportunism
Gays and the SWP
"Tinkerbell Meets Trotsky: The Revolution Betrayed": With this smirking title as a come-on, Boston's Cay Community News (19 September 1981) reviewed two collections of Socialist Workers Party (SWP) internal documents on gay liberation recently published by gay activists to scandalize the SWP. The document collections, Cay Liberation and Socialism (published by David Thorstad) and No Apologies (published by Scott Forgione and Kurt Hill, with an introduction by Thorstad), cover the SWP's gyrations on the gay question from 1970 to 1979. Thorstad, Forgione and Hill are all ex-SWP members who want to expose the SWP's "betrayal" of gay lifestylist politics. In this they certainly succeed. They and the Cay Community News reviewer, Scott Tucker, an anarchist/gay liberationist, use the sorry story of SWP hypocrisy to denounce Trotskyism as an enemy of freedom for homosexuals.
But the SWP has not had anything in common with Trotskyism for a long time! The authentic Trotskyist tendency in this country, the Spartacist League, has never wavered in its commitment to opposing anti-gay backwardness and the brutal enforcement of sexual puritanism by the capitalist state. From our very inception as an organization and long before the advent of a "gay liberation movement" (and at a time when the SWP was still forcing gay members to resign!), the Spartacist League has fought against all victimization and persecution of homosexuals. But Thorstad & Co. would prefer not to acknowledge our record because their aim is to show that only those who see themselves as gay activists first and foremost can be relied on to defend the democratic rights of homosexuals.
Our commitment to gay rights has never meant patronizing acceptance of gay activists' lifestylist illusions. The Spartacist League has always argued against the dangerously Utopian belief that in this violent, class-divided society "only gays can liberate themselves." On the contrary, only socialist revolution can lay the basis for finally uprooting sick prejudices against "sexual deviance," through providing social alternatives to the stifling monogamous family, the main social institution oppressing women, children and homosexuals. Our aim is not a sectoralist "gay movement" but a revolutionary party based on the working class to lead the struggles of all the oppressed—and in which the best fighters from all sectors of the oppressed will be, not narrow representatives of "their people," but communist revolutionaries.
Lenin's exhortation in What Is To Be Done? (1903) guides our work:
"The Social-Democrat's ideal should not be the trade-union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects... who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat." Our principled approach to these questions has attracted to the Spartacist League some of the best elements of the New Left-derived gay liberation milieu, most notably the Los Angeles-based Red Flag Union (formerly Lavender & Red Union), with whom we fused in 1977 (see W&R No. 16, Winter 1977-78, which discusses the key political issues—defense of the Soviet Union, rejection of lifestylism—which laid the programmatic basis for the fusion).
By contrast, the SWP documents published by Thorstad, Forgione and Hill are a testament to the proposition that opportunism doesn't pay. The value of the SWP documents is not, as Thorstad maintains, that they are "the most important such debates ever to occur inside any left-wing group" or that they will prove "essential" to resolving the question of the relationship between the fight against homosexual oppression and the fight for socialism. They are, however, useful for the light they shed on the grotesque zig-zags and utter cynicism of the reformist SWP. That today the SWP now dismisses Thorstad and his "North American Man/Boy Love Association"— currently being victimized by a state witchhunt—as virtual child molesters, as part of the current SWP policy of benign neglect of gay rights, is not merely evidence of their adaptation to homophobia.
The method behind this history of flirtation with and abandonment of this specially oppressed sector is the same tailist approach the SWP brought to what they called the "autonomous mass movements" of feminists, black nationalists, Chicano nationalists, etc. With the proliferation of "do-it-yourself liberation" currents in the late 1960s/early 1970s, the SWP with consummate cynicism authored the proposition that "consistent" anythingism equals socialism and jumped on the gay bandwagon. When the lifestyle radical mood receded the SWP backed away from the gay question. Ultimately, the SWP rediscovered the working class and with predictable opportunist logic decided to "turn" to the unions by pandering to some of the most backward attitudes prevalent among workers, as for example through Barnes & Co.'s despicable defense of anti-homosexual "age of consent" laws.
If we can share the disgust of Thorstad et al. with the SWP's wretched politics, it is for very different reasons. There is a political chasm dividing the petty-bourgeois politics of gay community lifestylism from Marxism. Thorstad at least, has drawn the conclusion from his experiences in and out of the SWP that Marxism has nothing to say to homosexuals: "For years, gay socialists have been trying to develop a synthesis between homosexuality and socialism— After a decade of effort, I am ready to draw the conclusion that the left has failed to meet the challenge of gay liberation." He concludes his introduction to No Apologies by quoting an earlier gay liberationism Kurt Hiller, "The liberation of homosexuals can only be the work of homosexuals
themselves."
Spartacist League/ Spartacus Youth League contingent in Los Angeles march against anti-homosexual Briggs Initiative, July 1978.
Hill and Forgione (now, respectively, a supporter of the social-democratic Workers Power group and a staff member of Cay Community News) still present themselves as Marxists—of a sort. Littering their own documents with dozens of cutesy-poo illustrations (a cartoon of Lenin, Brezhnev and Trotsky in a gay bath), they conclude their foreword to No Apologies with the slogans "For an understanding of Michael Mouse-Lennonism too!" and "In defense of campy socialists as well as the socialist camp!" Is this the sort of treatment they think will serve "to further a Marxist perspective" on the gay question?
Tucker is an, unabashed anti-Marxist, an anarchist whose sense of political reality is best illustrated by his comment, "The SWP leadership has no sense of proportion if it really believes that transvestism is so much more exotic and eccentric to the masses than Trotskyism itself"! The entire point of his lengthy review is to use the SWP in order to write off "all 57 varieties of Marxism-Leninism" as "unfit for human consumption."
There is, however, a revolutionary alternative to Tucker's anarcho-lifestylism, Thorstad's advocacy of an autonomous gay movement, and Forgiohe/Hill's Mickey-Mouse "Marxism." To develop this theme, it is necessary to delve a little deeper into the SWP's slimy record and into the politics of gay liberationism.
The SWP in the '60s: "Gay is Good"...Maybe
As part of the SWP's political degeneration in the 1960s the organization adopted an unofficial policy of excluding homosexuals. As SWP honcho Jack Barnes admitted in a report to the Political Committee (the SWP top leadership) in November 1970, "Since the early 1960s the party and YSA [Young Socialist Alliance] have been moving toward a policy which proscribes homosexuals from membership" (quoted in Gay Liberation and Socialism, p. 5).
In its earlier revolutionary days the SWP leadership, in particular founding leader James P. Cannon, had a far different attitude. In his contribution to the commemorative book James P. Cannon As We Knew Him, longtime SWP leader Sam Gordon recalled the case of "a young leader of the organization ...[who] had fallen afoul of the New York homosexual laws, and was clapped into jail one day early in the thirties." Cannon, Gordon recalled, got the comrade out. "The case was finally quashed. Our comrade continued to be a leading member...." But in the 1960s the SWP was sloughing off simple decency, as well as revolutionary principles, in its pursuit of success on the cheap.
The hallmark of that New Left era was the SWP's vigorous attempt to mimic and adapt to black nationalism, feminism, Chicano nationalism (the mythical land of "Aztlan") and virtually every other "mass movement"—most importantly the liberal-bourgeois anti-war movement. As Barnes said, "The consistent and irreconcilable liberation struggle of an oppressed nationality is our struggle. If it is irreconcilable and consistent, then it will point toward socialism..." (speech to 1970 SWP convention). As applied to feminism et al. this became "consistent (fill in the blank) will lead to socialism." It was only a matter of time until Barnes & Co. discovered gay liberation. And if "Black is Beautiful" and "Sisterhood is Powerful" became, in the SWP's eyes, "socialist" slogans—then why not "Gay is Good"? Tucker indignantly raises this very point, and indeed, by the SWP's own logic, there's no reason they shouldn't have adopted this equally meaningless slogan as well.
However, there was a layer of SWP "old guard" conservatives, trade-union oriented and socially conservative, who, while they dared not challenge feminism and black nationalism so openly, found the gay movement hard to swallow. By the time the SWP got geared up to drop its ban on homosexual members and mount an intervention into the gay movement, that movement itself was already showing signs of dying down. Spring 1971 was the height of the SWP's brief infatuation with gay liberation: they mobilized heavily for gay marches and for a gay contingent in the April antiwar peace crawl in Washington. The Militant ran gay-oriented articles (many authored by Thorstad) in virtually every issue.
But as Thorstad later recalled, "The party's involvement had hardly begun when the brakes began to be applied" (Gay Liberator, December 1974-January 1975). In May 1971 the SWP announced a "probe" into the gay liberation movement that, in hindsight, was really the beginning of a withdrawal from it. The following year saw a lengthy literary discussion in the SWP's internal bulletin, which forms the bulk of the documents in Thorstad's collection. This concluded with the 1973 SWP convention where a "Memorandum on the Gay Liberation Movement" outlined the Barnes gang's intention to drop gay lib politics.
Without rejecting the sectoralist method which had led the SWP to briefly tail the gay movement, the Memo basically concluded that there was not enough of a movement to tail. This reality was covered with some orthodox Marxist phrases about taking no position on whether gay was better,, worse, or just as good as straight. The gay question, the Memo said, was simply a question of democratic rights, not (as gay activists would have it) a broader struggle to liberate everyone's sexual nature. And in a revealing aside on just how far lifestylist counter-culturalism had been allowed to flower inside the SWP, the Memo authors felt obliged to note that male comrades should not wear dresses and that "sexual activities... have no place at party socials." ,
The Memo, although it praised the gay liberation movement (with the exception of its "ultraleft" [sic] sector), naturally enough was seen as a gross betrayal by the gay liberationists recruited during the SWP's Spring fling, and especially by chief gay spokesman David Thorstad. A wave of quits predictably followed. As Thorstad explained in his December 1973 resignation statement: "It [the Memo] has made it impossible for gays to reconcile their commitment to gay liberation with party membership" (Cay Liberation and Socialism, p. 127).
Anita Bryant and "The Turn"
The SWP dumped the gay movement in '73 mainly because there didn't seem to be a lot of recruits to gain. There was also an element of concession to conservative SWP leaders like Tom Kerry and Nat Weinstein. So it was not unexpected that when, in 1977, Anita Bryant's hate campaign against homosexuals provoked a brief spate of massive demonstrations in U.S. cities, it also provoked a renewed interest in the gay movement in the SWP. SWP leader Doug Jenness authored a "clarification" on the '73 Memo, writing that "...we solidarize with the sentiment of the gay liberation movement that 'gay is good'" interpreting this not as advocacy of homosexuality (which of course it was!) but as a statement that "gay people are just as good as heterosexual people" (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 35, No. 5, 11 June 1977). An SWP gay oppositionist wrote that "since the June 7 Miami referendum, differences over the party's tactical orientation to the gay movement have been completely superceded by dramatic events—The party has responded in a revolutionary fashion to the latest upsurge of the gay movement" (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 35, No. 11, 9 July 1977).
But no sooner had the mass marches ceased than SWP interest in the gay movement ceased. Simultaneously, having watched the black nationalist, feminist, antiwar and other New Left movements die off in the 1970s, the SWP suddenly discovered the working class. That is to say, Barnes & Co. found something new to tail: the liberal wing of the trade-union bureaucracy. The very same people who had been the architects of what they now called the "long detour" from the working class into the various "independent mass movements" of the oppressed now began declaiming the elementary Marxist concept that the working class alone has the social weight to make socialist revolution and serve as the liberator of all the oppressed. Cynical? Certainly. Dishonest? By all means. This "turn" meant not only the end of the SWP's dabbling with gay lifestylist politics, but an adaptation to the most backward attitudes, not just among the working class, but increasingly to new moods of conservatism being enforced by a reactionary bourgeois backlash against the "permissive" 1960s.
In part in a drive to ingratiate themselves with liberal union reformers like Ed Sadlowski of the Steelworkers and Arnold Miller of the Mine Workers, the Barnes leadership sought to purge the SWP of its more flagrantly non-"proletarian" elements. Flamboyant gay liberationists were on the top of the list. It only remained to find a reasonable excuse to publicly ditch the gay orientation. In February 1979 an excuse was found—age-of-consent laws and the turn of part of the gay movement (Thorstad in particular) to the explosive issue of "cross-generational" sex and rights for gay youth.
At a Philadelphia conference to plan for a national gay march on Washington, SWPers took an active part. One of the demands raised was "full rights for gay youth, including revision of age-of-consent laws" (later watered down to "protection for lesbian and gay youth ..."). Little more than a month later the Militant (13 April 1979) ran a major article, "The Class-Struggle Road to Winning Gay Rights," in order to reject the march on Washington and blast the very existence of a "so-called gay movement defined by sexuality." The most vicious thrust was a direct attack on Thorstad for having "foisted" the issue of "man-boy love" on the gay movement.
"The repeal of age-of-consent laws is a reactionary demand..." proclaimed the SWP; "saying that children have the 'right' to 'consent' to sex with adults is exactly like saying children should be able to 'consent' to work in a garment factory twelve hours a day." The Militant even rejected '"non-abusive consensual' sex by adults with children": "Laws designed to protect children from sexual and economic exploitation by adults are historic acquisitions of the working class and should be enforced." The SWP refused to mobilize for the Washington march they had helped to plan. Forgione and Hill fought a losing battle against the new direction internally while Michael Maggi, a former co-thinker of Thorstad's who had seen the light in 1973 and become a loyal Barnesite, termed Thorstad a "baby-fucker" and ordered gay literature in the SWP's New York City bookstore thrown out, according to No Apologies.
The issue of age-of-consent laws (or rather, the frightening, still socially taboo issue of childhood sexuality) is inflammatory. Nonetheless, opposition to such laws must be elementary for defenders of democratic rights for youth, whatever their sexual orientation. As Young Spartacus (Summer 1979) put it:
"Revolutionaries, unlike the social-democratic SWP, oppose any and all legal restrictions by the capitalist state on effectively consensual sexual activity. Get the cops out of the bedrooms! We know that such measures are not designed to protect children but to enforce the sexual morality of the nuclear family, which is at the root of the oppression of women, youth and homosexuals "Those who, like the SWP, join the reactionary chorus calling for the capitalist state to enforce the sexual codes based on the morality of the bourgeois family only help to prop up a key bastion of child abuse and one of the strongest pillars of capitalist oppression."
"Gay Liberation" and Marxism
While Forgione and Hill were making their last stand for gay lifestylism in the SWP, they attempted to claim that the Barnes leadership was going the way of the "sectarian" Spartacist League. As Hill wrote:
"The party leadership appears to have capitulated to the sectarian-workerist traits which we used to blast in our opponents. We ridiculed the 'class struggle' formalism of the sectarians such as the Spartacist League who charged that our attitude toward struggles such as women's liberation and Black liberation was'petty-bourgeois.'We encouraged the developments of these and other mass movements for social change."
—SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 36, No. 22,12
July 1979
In some ways Forgione and Hill were simply the most consistent defenders of the SWP's course throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. "Key terms used in the past/' they wrote, "such as 'best builders' of the 'independent mass struggles/ are giving way to the 'worker-Bolsheviks' of 'labor's strategic line of march'....the party is beginning to drift away from the theoretical acquisitions of the past, 20 years" (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 36, No. 22).
Quite so. But what Forgione and Hill cannot comprehend is that what they term "theoretical acquisitions" had been simply opportunist rationales for tailing petty-bourgeois, self-boosting, mutually-conflicting "mass movements" and that Barnes' "turn" was not toward genuine Trotskyism but toward tailing a new "mass movement"—labor reformism.
What unites all the somewhat disparate elements in the "gay community" is a common commitment to the politics of the gay lifestyle. To the gay liberationist, at bottom simply being openly homosexual is in itself a political act. To the "socialist" gay liberationist, it is even revolutionary. As Forgione put it: "It has been through this struggle for self-affirmation as-an equal human being ('coming out') that has led increasing numbers of lesbians and gay men... to become quite convinced that this society is sick and has to be either radically changed or replaced" (SWP Discussion Bulletin, Vol. 36, No. 17, 9 July 1979).
"Coming out" is obviously a personal decision—and one which, given the realities of life in this society, has potentially serious consequences. But for the New Left and its various spin-offs, the personal is political. Quoting anarchist Gustav Landauer in his review, Scott Tucker is quite explicit that the revolution is accomplished by living a revolutionary lifestyle: "The State is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour; we destroy it by contracting other relationships, by behaving differently."
Would that it were so easy to create a new society! The state happens to enforce its morality and its exploitative form of production, with cops, courts, prisons—internationally with MX missiles and armies— and those who go against it are going to get attacked.
The best proof that gay liberation is a petty-bourgeois ideology is that an openly gay lifestyle in a "gay community" is only possible in severely restricted and largely middle-class "gay ghettoes"—West Hollywood, Castro Street, the West Village. What about gay men and lesbians who do not or cannot move to one of these gay islands in a sea of "patriarchal capitalism"? Cay liberation has no answer.
In fact, Forgione and Hill revealed their own petty-bourgeois biases by their violent resistance to the SWP's "turn" to the working class. They took offense when SWP leaders implied that gays were a petty-bourgeois species, and insisted that there are gay workers too. But when it came time to reach out to their "brothers" in the steel and auto plants, Forgione and Hill seemed strangely reluctant. This is not to give any credence to the Barnes gang's "proletarian" credentials, but Forgione and Hill seem to assume that the only role for homosexual socialists is doing "gay work" in the "gay community."
Can homosexuals, as Thorstad insists, liberate themselves? Here the question of "social weight," referred to ad nauseum in the SWP documents, rears its head. For all that the Socialist Workers Party used this concept simply cynically, nonetheless they have a point—and one on which the Spartacist League insisted while Barnes & Co. were hopping on and off the gay liberation bandwagon. We are for "the sexual liberation of everybody"—however, we certainly do not intend to legislate the sexual behavior of future generations by putting our "seal of approval" on any particular sexual mode in this necessarily deforming society—gay, straight, mixed, whatever. That is why we pose our demands in the sexual-personal area negatively: against moralistic state legislation of sexuality. • But more immediately, changing this society means a struggle for power—which means creating a powerful mass party rooted in the working class, which alone has the cohesiveness and social weight, because it produces this society's wealth, to make a socialist revolution. To eliminate the oppression of homosexuals, rooted in the sexual morality of the bourgeois family, it will ultimately be necessary to replace the family with other cooperative institutions in a socialist society. The immediate aftermath of socialist revolution will wipe out all discriminatory laws and criminal sanctions against "deviant" sexual behavior. But a more fundamental transformation is required to change deeply-rooted, ancient attitudes toward sex roles and sexuality. We don't think this is an easy, or simply resolved, question by any means. Nonetheless, the ultimate goal of Marxism has always been the creation of a society in which every individual can develop his potential to the utmost, freed of economic compulsion and attendent psychological miseries.
The job of revolutionaries is to forge a revolutionary vanguard party which can, as Lenin said, serve as a "tribune of the people," fighting all forms of oppression as part of the necessary education of the proletariat in assuming its leading role in the creation of a new society. In the end the "best builders" of rights and freedom for homosexuals will be those who, whatever their sexual orientation, are builders of such a party.
*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-In Defense of Homosexual Rights: The Marxist Tradition
Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for "Communism and homosexuality".
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Summer 1988 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
In Defense of Homosexual Rights: The Marxist Tradition
Defense of democratic rights for homosexuals is part of the historic tradition of Marxism. In the 1860s, the prominent lawyer J.B. von Schweitzer was tried, found guilty and disbarred for homosexual activities in Mannheim, Germany. The socialist pioneer Ferdinand Lassalle aided von Schweitzer, encouraging him to join Lassalle's Universal German Workingmen's Association in 1863. After Lassalle's death, von Schweitzer was elected the head of the group, one of the organizations that merged to form the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). The SPD itself waged a long struggle in the late 19th century against Paragraph 175 of the German penal code, which made homosexual acts (for males) a crime. August Bebel and other SPD members in the Reichstag attacked the law, while the SPD's party paper Vorwarts reported on the struggle against state persecution of homosexuals.
In 1895 one of the most infamous anti-homosexual outbursts of the period targeted Oscar Wilde, one of the leading literary lights of England (where homosexuality had been punishable by death until 1861). Wilde had some socialist views of his own: his essay, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," was smuggled into Russia by young radicals. When the Marquess of Queensberry called him a sodomist, Wilde sued for libel. Queensberry had Wilde successfully prosecuted and sent to prison for being involved with Queensberry's son. The Second International took up Wilde's defense. In the most prestigious publication of the German Social Democracy, "Die Neue Zeit", Eduard Bernstein, later known as a revisionist but then speaking as a very decent Marxist, argued that there was nothing sick about homosexuality, that Wilde had committed no crime, that every socialist should defend him and that the people who put him on trial were the criminals.
Upon coming to power in 1917 in Russia, the Bolshevik Party began immediately to undercut the old bourgeois prejudices and social institutions responsible for the oppression of both women and homosexuals— centrally the institution of the family. They sought to create social alternatives to relieve the crushing burden of women's drudgery in the family, and abolished all legal impediments to women's equality, while also abolishing all laws against homosexual acts. Stalin's successful political counterrevolution rehabilitated the reactionary ideology of bourgeois society, glorifying the family unit. In 1934 a law making homosexual acts punishable by imprisonment was introduced, and mass arrests of homosexuals took place. While defending the socialized property forms of the USSR against capitalist attack, we Trotskyists fight for political revolution in the USSR to restore the liberating program and goals of the early Bolsheviks, including getting the state out of private sexual life. As Grigorii Batkis, director of the Moscow Institute of Social Hygiene, pointed out in "The Sexual Revolution in Russia," published in the USSR in 1923:
"Soviet legislation bases itself on the following principle:
'It declares the absolute non-interference of the state and society into sexual matters so long as nobody isinjured and no one's interests are encroached upon
"Concerning homosexuality, sodomy, and various other forms of sexual gratification, which are set down in European legislation as offenses against public morality—Soviet legislation treats these exactly the same as so-called 'natural' intercourse. All forms of sexual intercourse are private matters." [emphasis in original]
—quoted in John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement 1864-1935
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Summer 1988 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
In Defense of Homosexual Rights: The Marxist Tradition
Defense of democratic rights for homosexuals is part of the historic tradition of Marxism. In the 1860s, the prominent lawyer J.B. von Schweitzer was tried, found guilty and disbarred for homosexual activities in Mannheim, Germany. The socialist pioneer Ferdinand Lassalle aided von Schweitzer, encouraging him to join Lassalle's Universal German Workingmen's Association in 1863. After Lassalle's death, von Schweitzer was elected the head of the group, one of the organizations that merged to form the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). The SPD itself waged a long struggle in the late 19th century against Paragraph 175 of the German penal code, which made homosexual acts (for males) a crime. August Bebel and other SPD members in the Reichstag attacked the law, while the SPD's party paper Vorwarts reported on the struggle against state persecution of homosexuals.
In 1895 one of the most infamous anti-homosexual outbursts of the period targeted Oscar Wilde, one of the leading literary lights of England (where homosexuality had been punishable by death until 1861). Wilde had some socialist views of his own: his essay, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," was smuggled into Russia by young radicals. When the Marquess of Queensberry called him a sodomist, Wilde sued for libel. Queensberry had Wilde successfully prosecuted and sent to prison for being involved with Queensberry's son. The Second International took up Wilde's defense. In the most prestigious publication of the German Social Democracy, "Die Neue Zeit", Eduard Bernstein, later known as a revisionist but then speaking as a very decent Marxist, argued that there was nothing sick about homosexuality, that Wilde had committed no crime, that every socialist should defend him and that the people who put him on trial were the criminals.
Upon coming to power in 1917 in Russia, the Bolshevik Party began immediately to undercut the old bourgeois prejudices and social institutions responsible for the oppression of both women and homosexuals— centrally the institution of the family. They sought to create social alternatives to relieve the crushing burden of women's drudgery in the family, and abolished all legal impediments to women's equality, while also abolishing all laws against homosexual acts. Stalin's successful political counterrevolution rehabilitated the reactionary ideology of bourgeois society, glorifying the family unit. In 1934 a law making homosexual acts punishable by imprisonment was introduced, and mass arrests of homosexuals took place. While defending the socialized property forms of the USSR against capitalist attack, we Trotskyists fight for political revolution in the USSR to restore the liberating program and goals of the early Bolsheviks, including getting the state out of private sexual life. As Grigorii Batkis, director of the Moscow Institute of Social Hygiene, pointed out in "The Sexual Revolution in Russia," published in the USSR in 1923:
"Soviet legislation bases itself on the following principle:
'It declares the absolute non-interference of the state and society into sexual matters so long as nobody isinjured and no one's interests are encroached upon
"Concerning homosexuality, sodomy, and various other forms of sexual gratification, which are set down in European legislation as offenses against public morality—Soviet legislation treats these exactly the same as so-called 'natural' intercourse. All forms of sexual intercourse are private matters." [emphasis in original]
—quoted in John Lauritsen and David Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement 1864-1935
*From The "Bob Feldman '68" Blog- "The Ballad Of Harvey Milk"
Click on the headline to link to a "Bob Feldman '68" blog entry- his song "The Ballad Of Harvey Milk" that connects right in with today's theme on the anniversary of the Stonewall uprising in 1969.
*Remember Stonewall 1969-The Other “Milk” Film- “The Times Of Harvey Milk”
Click On To Link To Guest Commentator Amy Rath's, Editor Of "The Women And Revolution" Pages Of The Working Class Newspaper "Workers Vanguard", Review Of "Milk' in 2009.
The Other “Milk” Film- “The Times Of Harvey Milk”
Originally reviewed in 2009 on the 25th Anniversary of “The Times Of Harvey Milk” documentary.
DVD Review
The Times Of Harvey Milk, Harvey, George Moscone and others, 1984
In the recent hoopla over the commercial film “Milk”, about the political rise and assassination (along with the Mayor, George Moscone) of the first acknowledged openly gay politician, San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and the Oscar-worthy performance by actor Sean Penn this little film documentary has been overshadowed. This is unfortunate on two counts. First, this film won, on its own merits, an Oscar, as well, for the Best Documentary of 1984. Secondly, for those with a political perspective, especially those with a leftist perspective, this documentary is a more satisfying and instructive film about the limitations of electoral politics as a vehicle for the advancement of any oppressed sector of society.
Below the headline for this review I have placed a link to a 2009 review of “Milk” by Amy Rath, editor of the Women and revolution pages of the working class newspaper “Workers Vanguard”. The points made there about the limitations of sectoral politics by segments of the oppressed are close to my own views and therefore I will merely make a few comments here about some other points of interest in the film.
This documentary is driven by footage of the events that led up to Harvey Milk’s political victory, his term of office, short as it was, the events surrounding the trial of his murderer, fellow Supervisor Dan White. And the outrage, justifiably so, of the gay community and others, over the jury verdict in the case (manslaughter). As is the nature of such efforts there are the inevitable “talking heads” who give their take on Milk, the meaning of his political life, some personal observations and comments by those who were influenced by, or worked politically with, Milk.
Two of the commentators stick out. One, a lesbian professor from San Francisco State (I think that is the right school) gives an overview of what the Milk campaign meant for the gay community and the struggle for political power in one city. The other, an old time local labor leader (important in a big labor town, at least at that time), who, seemingly kicking and screaming, came to admire Harvey Milk. One should pay careful attention to his comments even a quarter of a century later as, despite some real gains made by the gay and lesbian rights movement, there is nevertheless still a ”culture gap” that he expressed very well about his attitude toward gays before working with Milk and that is not uncommon, if politically incorrect, in many neighborhoods today.
Twenty five years after the release of this film how does the legacy of Harvey Milk’s work stand up? I don’t mean the limitations of the parliamentary (and legal) road to social reform. That is covered in the Rath article on “Milk”. I have also dealt with the question in other contexts around the women’s liberation struggle, the black liberation struggle and other questions of strategic importance to the struggle for a more just society. Rather I want to finish here with a little comment about Harvey Milk, the gay man. From this documentary it is clear that he was very political, very committed to the struggle for gays rights, not afraid, as in the case of Proposition 6 (the 1978 efforts by some right-wingers to exclude homosexuals from the public teaching profession), to tackle the yahoos and had a certain charisma. In short, all the attributes of any politico (at least a potentially successful one). But that is neither here nor there. What I think Milk’s short political life ultimately means was caught in the speech included in the film that he made after that Proposition 6 defeat where he called on all gays and lesbians to “come out of the closet" (a seemingly quaint term now but very advanced then) and fight the yahoos wherever they are and wherever you are. That, my friends, despite my differences of political strategy with the late Harvey Milk is very good advise indeed.
The Other “Milk” Film- “The Times Of Harvey Milk”
Originally reviewed in 2009 on the 25th Anniversary of “The Times Of Harvey Milk” documentary.
DVD Review
The Times Of Harvey Milk, Harvey, George Moscone and others, 1984
In the recent hoopla over the commercial film “Milk”, about the political rise and assassination (along with the Mayor, George Moscone) of the first acknowledged openly gay politician, San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk and the Oscar-worthy performance by actor Sean Penn this little film documentary has been overshadowed. This is unfortunate on two counts. First, this film won, on its own merits, an Oscar, as well, for the Best Documentary of 1984. Secondly, for those with a political perspective, especially those with a leftist perspective, this documentary is a more satisfying and instructive film about the limitations of electoral politics as a vehicle for the advancement of any oppressed sector of society.
Below the headline for this review I have placed a link to a 2009 review of “Milk” by Amy Rath, editor of the Women and revolution pages of the working class newspaper “Workers Vanguard”. The points made there about the limitations of sectoral politics by segments of the oppressed are close to my own views and therefore I will merely make a few comments here about some other points of interest in the film.
This documentary is driven by footage of the events that led up to Harvey Milk’s political victory, his term of office, short as it was, the events surrounding the trial of his murderer, fellow Supervisor Dan White. And the outrage, justifiably so, of the gay community and others, over the jury verdict in the case (manslaughter). As is the nature of such efforts there are the inevitable “talking heads” who give their take on Milk, the meaning of his political life, some personal observations and comments by those who were influenced by, or worked politically with, Milk.
Two of the commentators stick out. One, a lesbian professor from San Francisco State (I think that is the right school) gives an overview of what the Milk campaign meant for the gay community and the struggle for political power in one city. The other, an old time local labor leader (important in a big labor town, at least at that time), who, seemingly kicking and screaming, came to admire Harvey Milk. One should pay careful attention to his comments even a quarter of a century later as, despite some real gains made by the gay and lesbian rights movement, there is nevertheless still a ”culture gap” that he expressed very well about his attitude toward gays before working with Milk and that is not uncommon, if politically incorrect, in many neighborhoods today.
Twenty five years after the release of this film how does the legacy of Harvey Milk’s work stand up? I don’t mean the limitations of the parliamentary (and legal) road to social reform. That is covered in the Rath article on “Milk”. I have also dealt with the question in other contexts around the women’s liberation struggle, the black liberation struggle and other questions of strategic importance to the struggle for a more just society. Rather I want to finish here with a little comment about Harvey Milk, the gay man. From this documentary it is clear that he was very political, very committed to the struggle for gays rights, not afraid, as in the case of Proposition 6 (the 1978 efforts by some right-wingers to exclude homosexuals from the public teaching profession), to tackle the yahoos and had a certain charisma. In short, all the attributes of any politico (at least a potentially successful one). But that is neither here nor there. What I think Milk’s short political life ultimately means was caught in the speech included in the film that he made after that Proposition 6 defeat where he called on all gays and lesbians to “come out of the closet" (a seemingly quaint term now but very advanced then) and fight the yahoos wherever they are and wherever you are. That, my friends, despite my differences of political strategy with the late Harvey Milk is very good advise indeed.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
***From The "Workers' Press" Blog- Labor History Celebration in St. Louis: Commemorating the Strike of 1877
Click on the headline to link to a "Workers' Press" Blog entry- "Labor History Celebration in St. Louis: Commemorating the Strike of 1877."
http://workerspress.blogspot.com/2010/06/labor-history-celebration-in-st-louis.html
Markin comment:
This is an early important (and little known) action by a then important section of the American labor movement in the emerging industrial Midwest "heartland". Moreover, that strike (and other labor actions elsewhere that year) occurred in the same year that the Republican Party, including segments of its Radical Republican wing, sold out Radical Reconstruction in the South (by among other things removing the last of the Federal troops there at a time when such action left blacks and their white supporters virtually defenseless against white racial reaction), in order to get one Rutherford B. Hayes into the White House.
http://workerspress.blogspot.com/2010/06/labor-history-celebration-in-st-louis.html
Markin comment:
This is an early important (and little known) action by a then important section of the American labor movement in the emerging industrial Midwest "heartland". Moreover, that strike (and other labor actions elsewhere that year) occurred in the same year that the Republican Party, including segments of its Radical Republican wing, sold out Radical Reconstruction in the South (by among other things removing the last of the Federal troops there at a time when such action left blacks and their white supporters virtually defenseless against white racial reaction), in order to get one Rutherford B. Hayes into the White House.
*From The Pen Of Leon Trotsky- On The United Front
Click on the headline to link to a "Leon Trotsky Internet Archives" online copy of "On The United Front" from his 1921 Volume One of "The First Five Years Of The Communist International".
Markin comment:
It is always worthwhile to go back and read Leon Trotsky on many subjects, but it is especially worthwhile on an issue like the proper ways to use the united front as a tactic in our arsenal in the struggle for working class power.
Markin comment:
It is always worthwhile to go back and read Leon Trotsky on many subjects, but it is especially worthwhile on an issue like the proper ways to use the united front as a tactic in our arsenal in the struggle for working class power.
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